About From Cave Paintings to the Internet A Chronological and Thematic Database on the History of Information and Media
"As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes. . . ." – Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie (1755)
As the quotation from Denis Diderot suggests, the information overload that we associate with the Internet is not anywhere near new. The Internet is, however, certainly compounding the problem. From Cave Paintings to the Internet is designed to help you follow the development of information and media, and attitudes about them, from the beginning of records to the present. Containing annotated references to discoveries, developments of a social, scientific, theoretical or technological nature, as well as references to physical books, documents, artifacts, art works, and to websites and other digital media, it arranges, both chronologically and thematically, selected historical examples and recent developments of the methods used to record, distribute, exchange, organize, store, and search information. The database is designed to allow you to approach the topics in a wide variety of ways.
Approaching the History of Information and Media from Many Different Viewpoints
After publishing a relatively brief static timeline in my 2005 book, From Gutenberg to the Internet, I started expanding the timeline on my website. Gradually it evolved into this database, which is a work in progress. On July 23, 2010 From Cave Paintings to the Internet had 2939 entries, virtually all of which had multiple hyperlinks to online references. Some entries incorporated images, and few linked to video and sound. In addition to the standard keyword search, there were also eighty-four themes by which the database could be reviewed, allowing users to approach the information from many different perspectives.
Though the project began in printed form, and much of its information derives from books, it has evolved into this dynamic, fluid and expansive form far different from books, made possible by the Internet. This distinctive and evolving form combines features of traditional reference books, such as brief narratives, bibliographical references, and descriptive annotations, with the advantages of hyperlinks to additional information, including books, articles, images, newsgroups, and videos online, searchability through pre-assigned themes or random keywords, aspects of blogging, and a range, scope and flexibility that would be impossible without the Internet. In contrast to the static printed book form, which can only be revised infrequently, I am continuing to expand, revise, and improve this database as frequently as time permits. I hope From Cave Paintings to the Internet will assist you to review the history of information and media from your point of view.
You will find links to themes at the end of each entry. If you click on a theme after an entry you will see a timeline based on that theme alone. You can, of course, access the database by era, and you can switch back and forth between eras and themes. By following certain themes in the database you can trace the development of specific media; following others may help you trace interrelationships between media, or help you approach the history of information from other viewpoints.
Using the search box in the upper right corner of each screen you can search the database by any keyword, name, phrase or search combination. The keyword search may be the most efficient way to locate specific information. You will obtain different results depending on how you construct the search. For example, if your search includes more than one word, such as "digital library", you will receive more specific results if you include the search words within quotation marks rather than by simply entering those two words in the search box.
In order to follow the development of concepts or technologies I sometimes define themes loosely, and in order to make some themes more accessible to historical treatment I also combine related themes. For example, I combined Internet and Networking in order to trace this theme back to the first road networks in the ancient world, to railroads, to the telegraph lines that followed railroad lines, to telephone networks, up the network of networks that is the Internet. I also combined Social Media and Wikis to show a longer history for both topics. Occasionally an entry may be accidentally indexed to an inappropriate theme. If you notice such a mistake please report it.
Some themes currently exceed two or three hundred entries, making reviewing them more time-consuming than some users might prefer. To make the themes more readily accessible, and to make comparison of themes more practical, we have developed the Thematic Outline View. With this tool you can more rapidly review the dates and headlines for each theme in chronological order, and can click through to the full entry when interested. By opening additional thematic outline views in separate windows you can also more easily compare themes.
Although this is my individual project, I could not accomplish it without hundreds of physical books on the history of information in my growing personal library, access to digital books and journal articles, and the work of countless contributors to websites. To the tens of thousands of contributors to the Wikipedia I am especially grateful. Throughout the database users will find many quotations from, and innumerable hyperlinks to, the Wikipedia and a myriad of other websites. As with quotations from printed books, when I quote from a website I do not include footnotes within the web page, such as the considerable number of footnotes that may be found in certain Wikipedia articles. These footnotes can, of course, be accessed by clicking on the hyperlink. Conversely, when I quote from books I sometimes add hyperlinks when I feel that they may be useful, and I have also been known to add hyperlinks to quotations I take from websites. I give dates of access for sites from which I have taken quotations both as a reference point for the date the database entry was written or revised, and in case the site from which the quotation was taken folds or changes and the Internet Archive needs to be searched for the source. For the purposes of this database I am using an abbreviated form of bibliographic citation, but there should be sufficient details to enable users to identify the sources.
From the standpoint of selecting sources for hyperlinks the Wikipedia has the advantage of presumed longevity. As we all know, websites frequently come and go, and it is time-consuming to have to replace dead hyperlinks in a project as complex as this. But within the millions of articles in the Wikipedia articles sometimes are divided or moved, making old links disfunctional. I would appreciate your reporting broken or inaccurate links to any source when you find them in the database.
That the Wikipedia is the product of so many contributors, and is of uneven quality, usually raises concern among scholars. This caution should be applied to many sources of information, in print and online. While I am careful to cite my sources accurately, in order to build a database of this scope I work under the assumption that not all of the information or references can be verified. Paraphrasing a statement made by the Renaissance scholar-printer Aldus Manutius in his preface to his edition of Theocritus 1495/96, I believe that publishing "something is better than nothing," and that my primary task is to set down the information in useful form, to be improved later, if possible. I also believe that a published text may find many correctors, with the difference that the Internet compounds the problem by the speed at which it spreads true or false information. Whenever I find inaccuracies in From Cave Paintings to the Internet I correct them. Please report errors that you find.
As his schedule permits, my son Max is adding images to entries. When you see "view larger" after a caption, clicking on the image will bring up a larger version, and if you then click on the larger version, so may see a version of the image that is larger still. Sometimes clicking on an uncaptioned image will have the same result. From time to time I comment on an image within an annotation.
Increasingly, digital facsimiles of manuscripts and rare books are being made available on the Internet. Whenever I am aware of a digital facsimile of an item discussed I provide a link to it.
It is my pleasure to create and share this growing interactive record of my ongoing voyage through the history of information and media. Your comments are welcome. Bon voyage!
Thoughts about my 2005 book, From Gutenberg to the Internet
My 2005 book, From Gutenberg to the Internet, was the first anthology to reflect the origins of the various technologies that converged in the Internet. I tried to include readings that would appeal to those with technical background in computing and readers whose backgrounds and interests are of a more general nature. Separate from the anthology which comprises most of the book, the introduction contains, among other things, a relatively brief introductory essay which compares and contrasts the transition from manuscript to print initiated by Johannes Gutenberg's invention of printing by moveable type in the mid-15th century with the transition that began in the mid-19th century from a print-centric world to the present world in which printing co-exists with various electronic media that converged to form the Internet.
Why did I focus on making this comparison which is not directly related to the 800 pages of readings which comprise most of the book? Like many people of my generation outside the profession of computing, my educational background was in books and libraries rather than in computing. As a rare book dealer, publisher, bibliographer and author, I had a special interest in the history of books and printing. With the introduction of personal computing about 1980 I became gradually more and more immersed in computing issues, in cyberculture, and in the applications of personal computing to book design and production. Eventually I collected a pioneering library of rare books, manuscripts, and ephemera on the history of computing, networking, and telecommunications described in my 2002 book Origins of Cyberspace. From Gutenberg to the Internet was an outgrowth of that project. Faced with the dramatic changes brought by computing and the Internet, which transformed aspects of bookselling and publishing, I wanted to explore the history of present developments in the way that I found most compatible with my background, and in the way they impacted my own life. Of course, as I continued to explore the problems of comparing two complex series of technological and socio-economic developments separated by more than five hundred years, the limitations of the exercise became apparent. It would require some kind of encyclopedic work to make this comparison in detail, especially since the transformation of media that took place in the fifteenth century was mainly from manuscript to print while the Internet represents a merging of numerous different broadcast and communications media and print that is rapidly underway, making the comparison unusually nuanced, fluid and complex. But even though I recognized that the relatively brief introduction could not be definitive, and would probably be rapidly outdated, I felt that writing this pioneering essay was worth the effort, especially since people with interests similar to mine might find it thought-provoking. In spite of the significant limitations of the introduction, the anthology has retained its value.
Reading about new developments, it is my habit to look for antecedents, many of which appear in this database.
As a long-time student of the history of computing and information technology, equally interested in the present as in the recent and the distant past, it was probably inevitable that I would view book history, and the history of other media, from the perspective of computing and the Internet. Reading about new developments, it is my habit to look for antecedents, many of which appear in this database. Though I was certainly aware of the disruptive socio-economic changes that were taking place as a result of the Internet, when I wrote From Gutenberg to the Internet I did not foresee the enormous speed at which the transition from print to digital, or the parallel development of digital and print, would occur. Indeed, with the scanning of millions of books and periodicals, the online or conversion from print to online-only publication of numerous periodicals and newspapers, and the development and exploding popularity of the electronic book or eBook, for which the texts of hundreds of thousands of books are already available for reading on a growing diversity of eBook readers, cell phones, and computers, including Apple's iPad, one could argue that books and computing-- formerly separate cultures-- are rapidly merging into one. As eBooks develop we may expect interactive multi-media features and online connectivity to be added, bringing new dimensions to the format we associate with books, blurring the historic distinctions between the codex format and digital/Internet publications. Other distinctive examples--chosen from many-- of artifacts formerly primarily associated with print evolving, or merging with digital, might be cell phone novels, or the June 1, 2009 cover art of the The New Yorker print magazine created entirely on an iPhone!
The Challenges of Viewing the History of Books and Libraries from the Universal Library without Walls
Although the Internet has often been compared to a universal library, or a universal virtual library without walls, and even though we all read books on paper and use computers connected to the Internet, it is challenging to relate book and library history, which for most of recorded history concerned physical books and brick and mortar libraries, to computer / Internet history. Part of the difficulty may be a reflection of the very long separation between the cultures, which first began to merge in a widely-recognized way with desktop publishing, starting in 1984-85, and more noticeably five to ten years later through the Internet and the World Wide Web. Another part of the difficulty is that in addition to revolutionizing our means of communicating, reading, studying and publishing, the Internet is also revolutionizing our means of storing, organizing and accessing information. All of these are complex processes, and because they are rapidly evolving, we read about new and significant developments often. Considering that the merging of the physical and digital cultures is comparatively recent and changing pretty much all the time, one could, perhaps with some justification, dismiss computer/Internet history as largely irrelevant to most earlier aspects of physical book history. But if we take into account the dramatic merging of book culture with Internet culture that is occurring in our midst, we may recognize that studying the culture of the modern book without considering eBooks and the Internet may eventually become a scholarly specialty analogous to studying medieval manuscripts without studying the history of printing. And just as the culture of printing, with its resultant information explosion, affected our view of medieval manuscript culture, the culture of computing and the Internet, is, I believe, already impacting our view of the history of physical books, printing and other media. Those of us with a historical perspective may view the Internet not only as a research source to be used like a universal virtual library, but also, with respect to the new media evolving on the Internet, as a fundamental development in itself, with an impact as great, or greater on media, than the impact of printing had on the manuscript culture of the fifteenth century. If we do not want to limit our approach to aspects of media history in the manner of specialists, such as medievalists or incunabulists, how then should we pursue research on the history of books and other media in both their physical and digital forms?
Analogous to From Gutenberg to the Internet, you may view this database as a huge interactive anthology.
From Cave Paintings to the Internet is the developing product of my continuing explorations of the history of information and media since From Gutenberg to the Internet. Analogous to From Gutenberg to the Internet, a static printed book, you may view this database as a huge interactive anthology. Because the Internet represents a convergence of so many technologies and media, as well as the creation of new media, when viewing the history of media from the perspective of the Internet I believe that it may be necessary to trace the development of various Internet components, as reflected in some of the many themes in this database. Part of the difficulty, then, is selecting a point of view when so many themes are involved, and the rapid flow of complex new technologies spawned by the Internet make retaining a consistent historical perspective challenging. After struggling with this issue for some time I gradually concluded that it would be most useful to present selected material on many themes, allowing the user to mix and match, according to their own preferences, resulting in the evolving design of this database.
Counter-intuitively, the history of books and libraries may be more relevant today than before the Internet.
My bias toward the history of books and libraries will be evident in the quantity of entries on these and related subjects that I am building into the database. As I wrote in From Gutenberg to the Internet, it may be one of the digital revolution’s more counter-intuitive consequences that in order to put the dramatic impact of the Internet, and the information overload, of our time in perspective it may be helpful to revisit the development of printing in the mid-fifteenth century. Still another irony may be that to measure the impact of the innovation of printing upon the scribal culture of the fifteenth century we must review medieval manuscript book production and the history of the book prior to the introduction of printing. Thus, in a certain respect, elements of book history, and especially the scribal culture of book production by manuscript copying, including the pecia system, and the early history of printing, may be more relevant today, as a way of putting the rapid changes of our time in perspective, than they were before the impact of the Internet. Just as the impact of the Internet may have stimulated us to explore the history of information and media, and the convergence of various media on the Internet may have stimulated us to understand the roles of various media, such as as imaging, print, video and audio, in the history of information, the Internet has also provided better tools for exploring their histories than we ever had before. Not only can we search through virtually unlimited amounts of data almost instantaneously, but we often find the proverbial "needle in the haystack" remarkably quickly. As institutions and individuals expand the amount of digital information online, our search results become even more productive.Finding a Way Out of the Labyrinth
During the five years that I have been building this database-- piecing together elements of the history of the methods used to record, distribute, exchange, organize, store, and search information both in its theoretical and artifactual form--I have often reflected on the virtues and limitations of the non-traditional record that I have been producing, the size and scope of which long ago exceeded my original intention. Like one of my heros, the pioneering bibliographer Conrad Gessner wrote in his Bibliotheca universalis published in1545, I often feel like I am working within a labyrinth of historical data on many topics, with the difference that the database program provides a multitude of escape routes from the labyrinth through themes and key word searches, allowing this work in progress to remain usable while it is under construction. As the database has grown and my knowledge has gradually inscreased, my understanding and interpretation of the project has also evolved, causing me periodically to revise these introductory remarks. Because I have had the time, the abiding interest, and the tools to do the job, and because of the rapidly expanding availability of relevant searchable information on the Internet, From Cave Paintings to the Internet has assumed a range, scope, and form that I could not have imagined at the beginning.
Throughout its history book production typically took advantage of available technology.
Throughout its history book production typically took advantage of available technology, though for most of this history the technologies involved in book production, like the technologies of other media, did not necessarily intersect with the production of digital information. Prior to the development of desktop publishing, elements of information in book form and digital form, including mathematical and logical aspects, intersected at certain times and places, but the significance of those intersections was probably not recognized at the time by most participants in the separate cultures. Nor was analyzing these intersections, or tracing their development, generally considered a topic worthy of historical research. Among the earliest points at which book culture and digital information intersected, in their artifactual rather than theoretical aspects, were in production of mathematical tables from the earliest written records in Cuneiform script, to tables in medieval manuscripts, to printed tables, of which the first were probably the Alphonsine Tables (1483), to the 1960s when these tables were made obsolete by inexpensive electronic hand-held calculators. In book and newspaper production they occurred in early efforts to automate the typesetting process, beginning with punched paper tape systems to drive the Monotype and Linotype casting machines, and evolved into special-purpose computers for phototypesetting-- the precursor of today’s scalable digital fonts used on printers, monitors, cell phones, and eBook readers. The first computer text formatting program, TYPESET and RUNOFF (1964)-- derived from the commands used by typesetters to format documents-- was the forerunner of word processing programs, and also the forerunner of the HTML text and image formatting language used by web browsers to format web pages.
Early in the history of books and libraries, bibliographers, beginning with Kallimachos at the Royal Library of Alexandria, sought control over the information libraries contained through lists and indexes, initially on papyrus, parchment, and later in print. Some systems of index cards such as the Institut International de Bibliographie, founded by Paul Otlet and Henri la Fontaine in 1895, became almost unbelievably ambitious, and essentially amounted to analog search engines. In the twentieth century early intersections between physical and digital information included information retrieval projects, often bibliographically related, such as Vannevar Bush's Memex, Roberto Busa's Index Thomisticus, or Eugene Garfield's citation analysis, which was first published in book form. Some early information retrieval projects were influential upon the thinking of pioneers in other aspects of computing, such as J.C.R.Licklider. Licklider was the visionary behind development of the ARPANET, which eventually evolved into the Internet. As a psychologist, Licklider was especially interested in the relationship of people to computers. He was also interested in the relationship of the physical information in libraries to the digital information stored in the mainframes of the time, and in making the growing body of information stored in libraries more accessible. In 1965 he published a book, now for the most part forgotten, entitled Libraries of the Future. Roughly thirty years later a computer science project in library research at Stanford became the Google search engine, and Google's PageRank link algorithm was adapted and expanded for the Internet conceptually from the ranking of printed scientific papers through citation analysis. These are only a very small selection of hundreds of examples of the intersection of book culture and digital information tracked in this database. These intersections, which will help you relate aspects of book or artifactual history to computing / Internet /communications history, may be traced by following various themes from the main menu. The thematic timelines generated when you follow themes such as Book History from the main menu are, of course, very different from "histories" of these themes. They are a collection of chronological research notes, quotations, sometimes brief essays, that I continue to revise and expand, rather than historical narrative. But with further analysis, and hopefully more in-depth research, they could be pieced together into historical narratives.
No matter how radical change may be today my studies show that new media do not fully supercede the old.
No matter how radical change may be today my studies show that new media do not fully supercede the old. Manuscript copying persisted, to a limited degree, for at least 250 years after the invention of printing, and it is informative to review the manner in which it gradually diminished but remained in existence for limited purposes for such an extended period of time. Similarly electronic publication on the Internet is not superceding printing or making printed books obsolete; it is instead providing new opportunities for printing on demand, such as the Espresso Book Machine, or electronic substitutes or alternatives for segments of information which used to be distributed entirely through printing. Some of these electronic substitutes or alternatives include eBooks, Google Books, websites such as From Cave Paintings to the Internet, and the old standbys-- audio books. Nor has the development of computer graphics or computer drawing programs eliminated manual drawing on paper, painting on canvas, or other traditional forms of artistic expression. The Internet is also providing new distribution outlets for earlier media such as radio, television, and film, which continue to maintain their traditional distribution networks. In addition, the communication and interactive features of the web are stimulating development of new modalities, most notably social media, and user-generated content including wikis, virtual reality, newsgroups, blogs, podcasts, Flickr, Twitter, and "open source" scientific journals and other periodical publications, which exist only on the Internet. Interactive online features, including user-generated content, blended with traditional or industrial media such as newspapers and television, have transformed news reporting and distribution, and are transforming elements of publishing in general. Referencing earlier technology, Twitter, with its requirement of very brief messages, has been called "the telegraph system of Web.2.0."
Continuity with the Past in an Age of Discontinuity
Though the development of new media is occurring so rapidly that it may appear discontinuous with the past, this database demonstrates otherwise. The use of tally marks for counting predates writing. Computation is as ancient as written records. Over the centuries content evolved along with media for recording, distributing, organizing, searching, and storing information. The world’s first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, became operational in 1945, and it took forty to fifty years before the impact of electronic computing began to be felt throughout society on a daily basis with the invention and development of personal computers and their eventual connection to the Internet. While computing speeds the production and communication of information in all forms including printing, search engines on the Internet play a role analogous, but also vastly enhanced, to that played by bibliographical lists and catalogues of physical libraries and archives as they evolved over the centuries. To improve the accuracy of queries, search engines are increasingly applying artificial intelligence to help computers understand language.
The Historical Record as a Reflection of Information Survival and Loss
The historical record is based on information that survived. As a result of wars, looting, destruction of institutions, natural disasters or neglect, among other factors, inevitably more information was lost than was preserved. Themes traceable in this database include the loss and destruction of information, as well as significant survivals. For example, the technical records of digital information technology fill physical and digital libraries; however, we have relatively few records of the technical side of information technology until the sixteenth century, especially since considerable information was inevitably lost. We know relatively little about how Gutenberg invented printing by moveable type in the first half of the 15th century. What we do know is chiefly inferred from legal documents, and from research on examples of Gutenberg’s printing that survived. The first printers’ manuals were not published until the seventeenth century. For information about the early history of printing especially we must refer to the books themselves, to printers' archives, to other archival records that concern printing, as well as to the histories of printing that used these resources. For the period before printing we probably have less information on the production of manuscript books and manuscript copying, though scholars have pieced much together from surviving archival records, from palaeographical research, from individual manuscripts and their comparison, from the few surviving model books, and from the study of unfinished and finished illuminated manuscripts. Besides tracing the early records of manuscript copying and printing, the database attempts to track efforts at preservation and conservation, both of physical and digital objects.
The Pleasures and Challenges of Collecting and Writing this Database
Over my career I have had to deal with a wide range of disparate and esoteric historical information, and fairly early on I became interested in finding ways to manage large amounts of historical detail. This interdisciplinary database began as a brief, unannotated timeline on the history of computing, software, and networking in my 2002 book Origins of Cyberspace. I expanded that timeline to begin to cover a wider range of the history of information in my 2005 book, From Gutenberg to the Internet. Prior to that I had extensive experience writing and editing chronological annotated bibliographical listings of historically significant medical and biological publications in my edition (1991) of Morton's Medical Bibliography (Garrison & Morton), the manuscript for which I edited in a series of MS Word files running under MS-DOS. That physical book contained 8900 annotated entries. Its indices, which had to be created manually, were problematic.
In From Cave Paintings to the Internet, we are attempting to exploit most of the indexing and searching capabilities of the Internet, which most certainly represent one of the Internet's most significant advantages over prior media. Implementation of these electronic indexing technologies presented their own technical challenges-- different, of course, from preparing a book index, but aggravating in their own way. After a few years of experimentation, with the help of Jessica Gore we finally solved the indexing problems for this database and our entire website through the installation of a PicoSearch premium search engine. In the database I am maintaining relatively comprehensive, but, of course, selective coverage of major developments in computing, software, networking, telecommunications and related fields such as computers and society, and graphics, visualization, animation. Beyond these subjects, and the general topics of information and media, From Cave Paintings to the Internet tracks the development of diverse interests of mine, including among topics not already mentioned in these remarks, aspects of archaeology, art, prints & printmaking, architecture, book illustration, cartography, computers and the human brain, cryptography, robotics / automata, music history, the history of ecology, prehistory, medicine, museums, natural history, science, technology, and economics. Those familiar with the classic reference by Carter and Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967), will notice numerous citations of that work in the database. Published in the print-centric world that existed at the beginning of my antiquarian bookselling career, Printing and the Mind of Man was highly influential on my development as a bookseller and bibliographer. At one time I had the ambition to revise that work or to write a similar book from a more "modern" perspective. Instead of doing that, entries in From Cave Paintings to the Internet that correspond to entries in Printing and the Mind of Man reflect my "take" on some of the texts so influential on the development of Western Civilization. At heart I am a collector, and I find collecting, writing, organizing, correcting and improving this database both a pleasure and a challenge.
An Individual Approach
It should be obvious that this interactive database can reflect only an outline of selected examples on the topics to which it refers, and that this outline will always be more or less incomplete. Though the database was designed to be accessed from many different viewpoints, in its selection of information, and in the way the information is presented, the database reflects the approach of this individual author/editor to the topics concerned. Considering the range of topics covered, the span of time involved, and the impossibility of truly comprehensive coverage, this individual approach may remain its strength.
Resources for Book History
Book history has become an increasingly well established field of academic research. For the formal study of book history in an increasingly digital world we are fortunate to have a selection of educational programs including the University of Virginia Rare Book School, and the newer Rare Books and Special Collections program at the Palmer School at Long Island University, the California Rare Book School at UCLA, and the Watts Program for the History of the Book at Brown University. At the University of Saskatchewan there is an innovative program and website on The History and Future of the Book. Additional programs are offered in England, France, Australia, and New Zealand. These rare book schools, which incorporate digital technology as teaching and communications tools, co-exist with standard library training programs which increasingly focus on information science and technology. The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) has over 1000 members in over 20 countries, including professors of literature, historians, librarians, publishing professionals, sociologists, bibliophiles, classicists, booksellers, art historians, reading instructors, and independent scholars. Its website provides an invaluable collection of links related to book history. Supporting scholarship on the history of books, printing, and libraries, Book History Online, the worldwide database for scholarship on the history of the book, was established in 1997 at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Copenhagen. This database uses digital technology as a means of organizing and communicating information on many aspects of the history of physical information. A more specialized online resource is the Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania. This contains the descriptions of more than 60,000 medieval manuscripts produced before 1600. Other notable digital resources concerning medieval manuscripts and libraries include the Pecia website and blog. For fifteenth century printing there is the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue maintained by the British Library. Currently it lists just under 30,000 items. This and the English Short Title Catalogue, also maintained by the British Library, which lists over 460,000 items published in the British Isles and America between 1473 and 1800, represent bibliographical reference works far more widely accessible, more comprehensive, and more easily searched than they could be in printed form.
For the history and traditions of book collecting, and the ongoing process of forming and maintaining, and preserving libraries of rare books and manuscripts, there are numerous clubs and societies, of which The Grolier Club of New York is the most distinguished in the United States. A manuscript collector and dealer’s group is The Manuscript Society. Because of long and illustrious historical tradition of physical information there are hundreds, and perhaps thousands of institutional libraries around the world that hold rare books and manuscripts. There are also numerous museums and institutional libraries that hold recorded information prior to the codex, such as stone inscriptions, cuneiform tablets, and papyrus rolls.
In spite of the relative fragility of papyrus, the Egyptian desert provided a comparatively hospitable environment for their preservation. As a result of extensive archaeological research mainly since the 1890s, there are about 45,000 papyri in six institutional libraries and museums in the United States, and numerous papyri preserved in other countries. It has been estimated that there are about 500,000 unpublished papyri. Many await further research. The Tebtunis Papyri, a collection of more than 30,000 papyrus fragments preserved at The Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley, represent the largest collection of papyrus texts in the Americas. Twenty-one institutions cooperate in development of the Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS), a collections-based repository hosting information about and images of papyrological materials, such as papryi, ostraca, and wood tablets, located in collections around the world.
Resources for the History of Computing, Digital Information, and Humanities Computing
Organizations and institutions concerning the history of computing and the Internet are far more limited in number. Some of the most significant are the Charles Babbage Institute in Minneapolis, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, the Science Museum in London, and the IEEE Computer Society. Since 1976 the IEEE has published IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. For the history of media--film, radio, and television-- there is the International Association for Media and History. For the history of information management and information science there are various useful websites such as that of Professor Michael Buckland.
For humanities computing or digital humanities there are Interdisciplinary Sciences Reviews edited by Willard McCarty, the Humanist Discussion Group, "an international online seminar on humanities computing and the digital humanities" also edited by McCarty, and The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations.