[ISHMap-List] Fwd: ["EXLIBRIS-L"] Ligatus Language of Binding On-line Thesaurus

[Joel Kovarsky]

This announcement might be of interest to some here.

       Joel Kovarsky


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	["EXLIBRIS-L"] Ligatus Language of Binding On-line Thesaurus
Date: 	Mon, 10 Aug 2015 15:22:13 +0100
From: 	Nicholas Pickwoad <npickwoad at paston.co.uk>
Reply-To: 	exlibris-l at list.indiana.edu
To: 	EXLIBRIS-L at LIST.INDIANA.EDU



Ligatus is proud to announce the launch of the Language of Binding 
online thesaurus of bookbinding terms, which was celebrated with a 
one-day event in the Chelsea College of Arts (University of the Arts 
London) in collaboration with CERL on 23 June, 2015.

The aim of the thesaurus is to present a consistent vocabulary for the 
use of all those who work with early bindings, built wherever possible 
on existing resources, but adapted for use in an on-line hierarchical 
environment that will allow terms that are not known to a user to be 
found. It is constructed around concepts (such as different bookbinding 
components, features, materials or techniques) that can be expressed by 
a number of language terms (labels). The thesaurus allows one concept to 
have more than one label, which allows the same concept to be searched 
for by the different terms that may have been used historically to 
describe it. It will also allow the concepts to be expressed in 
different languages.

The Language of Binding thesaurus can be used as a reference online 
resource that can be searched by keyword or alphabetically. The concepts 
contained in the thesaurus are, however, also arranged hierarchically, 
based on a class/sub-class relationship, which allows concepts to be 
retrieved by navigating down the hierarchies even if their label (the 
term) is not known.

It is hoped that the thesaurus will enable all those who work with books 
in early bindings to arrive at more consistent descriptions of those 
bindings. By being based primarily on single concepts, it has tried to 
avoid the more familiar but sometimes frustratingly imprecise language 
that has often been used in the past. This means that some of these 
familiar terms will not be found as labels, though they may be referred 
to in the scope notes that define and describe the concepts (and can 
therefore be found by a simple keyword search).

At the moment, the thesaurus contains labels primarily in English, but 
work on its translation has already started, and plans for the addition 
of illustrations are also underway. The thesaurus can, in addition, be 
used as a look-up service for software applications that need to 
populate schema fields from thesauri.

An accompanying volume, Coming to Terms: guidelines for the description 
of historical bindings, which is based on the terms in the thesaurus, is 
to be published in the autumn.

The success of the thesaurus will to a large extent depend on 
contributions made to it by its users, either to add more concepts, 
refine existing scope notes or correct mistakes. Such contributions to 
the thesaurus will be welcomed, and can be made online following a 
registration process.

The thesaurus can be accessed at: http://www.ligatus.org.uk/lob

Ligatus is a research centre of the University of the Arts London with 
projects in libraries and archives and with a particular interest in 
historic bookbinding. The Language of Binding thesaurus is the result of 
our long experience with historic bookbindings, but has been greatly 
assisted by contributions from an international group of bookbinding 
experts and book conservators. This work was made possible by a 
Networking Grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK.




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