News Archives

Researching Medieval Manuscripts: From Cataloging to Cultural History

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 29 June–4 July 2025
Format: in person, Oxford University in Oxford, UK
Fee: $1,495

Oxford is home not just to lost causes and dreaming spires but to the largest concentration of medieval manuscripts within any European university. This course will give you privileged access to these, as well as a grounding in how to make the most of them. The core skill which you will learn will be how to provide a codicological description of a manuscript, as appears in the catalogs which act as the main reference works for them. […]

Institutional Book Arts Collections: Evaluating & Describing

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 7–11 July 2025
Format: online only
Fee: $900

This course will introduce topics in the management of book arts collections, with the term “book arts” referring broadly to any work created through book arts practices (i.e., hand bookbinding, letterpress printing, hand papermaking, &c.).

Topics will include collection development and selection, organization, description, and the development of access policies and procedures. Emphasis will be placed on how book art objects can be evaluated as cultural, material, evidential, artistic, and scholarly objects, and the challenges associated with accurately representing these works through descriptive practices. […]

Medieval Manuscript Fragments: Cataloging & Discoverability

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 20–25 July 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

The study of medieval manuscript fragments has developed into its own specialization in recent years, incorporating paleography, codicology, liturgiology, musicology, textual studies, art history, bibliography, provenance, and digital humanities, among other disciplines. Hundreds of North American collections house early fragments, whether binding waste, cuttings, or single leaves, and most of these are in need of effective description to facilitate discoverability. In this weeklong class—intended primarily for catalogers, curators, and librarians—we will focus on cataloging and discoverability. […]

Modern Special Collections Cataloging

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

While rare book and special collections libraries are associated with antiquarian, hand-press books, these collections increasingly include twentieth- and twenty-first-century materials that are not “rare” in the traditional sense of the word. While these materials are more suited to description with RDA rather than one of the Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (DCRM) manuals, they still have unique features and challenges that require a different cataloging perspective than is found in general collections cataloging. […]

Digital Sustainability for Cultural Collections

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 31 July–4 August 2023
Format: online only
Fee: $800

Good practice for digital sustainability involves the application and adaptation of an array of skills that accumulate through exposure and experience, and that evolve in response to technological change. Digital sustainability is grounded in standards that inform and reflect good practice. Students in this seminar will explore core concepts and capabilities of digital practice as illustrated by scenarios, examples, and demonstrations with hands-on components in small groups. This seminar assures familiarity with digital content (personal or organizational) and curiosity about the opportunities and implications of digital sustainability. […]

Reference Sources for Researching Printed Western Americana

Course Length: 12 hours
Course Week: 24–25 June 2023
Format: in person, Indiana University in Bloomington, IN
Fee: $800

The American West has long been a popular field for book collectors, antiquarian booksellers, and institutional libraries, and bibliographers have produced a large number of reference works related to it. In this two-day course, we’ll examine more than 100 printed and electronic bibliographies, catalogues, and other reference sources, which focus on printed materials relating to, or printed in, the American West through the early twentieth century, as this geographical area has been variously defined by those in the world of rare books. […]

Forgeries, Facsimiles & Sophisticated Copies (Online)

Course Length: 22 hours
Schedule: 11 a.m.–5 p.m. ET (including breaks), 9–13 January 2023
Format: Online
Course fee: $1,000

This course offers an introduction to the technologies historically and currently used to produce typographical forgeries and facsimiles, as well as tools for their detection. It is designed for individuals already familiar with the hand-press book, but who would like to develop their sense of the changes—especially those done to deceive—which have been wrought upon books over the course of their lives.

Drawing from the RBS teaching collections and other materials, students will examine the various means—typographical, […]

Introduction to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Length: 6 hours
Format: Online

Designed for librarians, archivists, curators, and others with an interest in special collections and exhibitions focused on the global Black experience, this course provides an introduction to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. One of The New York Public Library’s research libraries, the Schomburg Center is an historic institution recognized for its devotion to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. Special collections materials are held in the Schomburg Center’s Divisions of Art & Artifacts; Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books; […]

Why Black Bibliography Matters

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 21–26 July 2024
Format: in person, Princeton University in Princeton, NJ
Fee: $1,495 

In the 1970s, librarians, cataloguers, and researchers confronted an issue that was barely conceivable to previous generations: a surplus of Black-authored books. Prior bibliographers had taken stock of a delimited set of authors from the eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. The field shifted dramatically after World War II, however, when the number of authors and types of books increased to a dizzying degree. After a veritable revolution in Black print in the 1960s, […]

The Photographic Book since 1843

Course Length: 12 hours
Schedule: 7–11 July 2025
Format: Online
Fee: $900

The nature, form, and impact of the book changed dramatically with the introduction of photography, altering the way books would be made, would appear, and would help transform the communication of ideas in visual form.

In parallel to this phenomenon, the ability of the photograph to reach its widest audience would entail an essential partnership with the form of the book. The nomenclature of photography remains tied to the book: we think of the photographic “print” and of “printing” a photograph, […]

Descriptive Bibliography: The Fundamentals

Length: 10 hours
Format: Online

This 10-hour online course is intended for persons who desire a better understanding of the physical examination and description of printed books, especially of the period 1550–1850. It is designed both for those with little formal exposure to this subject and for those with some general knowledge who seek a systematic discussion of (or refresher to) the elements of physical description as set forth in Fredson Bowers’ Principles of Bibliographical Description.

This abbreviated course differs from G-10 in that it focuses more narrowly on the creation of a basic bibliographical description, […]

Paper as Bibliographical Evidence

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI
Fee: $1,495

This course will focus on bound, printed works in the West from the eighteenth century, when all paper was made by hand, through the nineteenth century when the introduction of two machines—the fourdrinier and the cylinder—changed the manufacture of paper and some of its characteristics. In addition to learning about traditional hand- and machine-papermaking materials and technologies, participants will apply what is taught in lectures directly to the examination and identification of a wide variety of papers found in bound artifacts. […]

Physical Bibliography for Book Conservators

N.B. Enrollment for this course is currently limited to participants in the RBS-Mellon Library and Archives Conservation Education (LACE) Consortium Program.

The course is intended for book conservators who seek a richer understanding of the physical features of printed books, especially of the period 1500–1900, and of standard bibliographical methods for describing those features. The course will cover typography (type sizes, fonts, and non-textual material); letterpress composition and printing; paper and illustration as bibliographical evidence; provenance (ownership markings, inscriptions, bookplates, and the ways in which books have been physically altered by owners and readers); and the analysis and description of book structure (format, […]

Forgeries, Facsimiles & Sophisticated Copies

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 8–13 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

This course offers an introduction to the technologies historically and currently used to produce typographical forgeries and facsimiles, as well as tools for their detection. It is designed for individuals already familiar with the hand-press book, but who would like to develop their sense of the changes—especially those done to deceive—which have been wrought upon books over the course of their lives.

Drawing from the RBS teaching collections and other materials, […]

Integrating Born-Digital Materials: Archival Standards & Approaches

Archives have always been format agnostic and nothing has changed with the introduction of born-digital materials (born-digital materials are those that began life on a computer, rather than as digitized surrogates of real-world artifacts). Managing archives and providing access to them requires a toolkit of flexible strategies and standards that archivists can deploy based on a shifting landscape of institutional priorities and realities. We will explore the range and utility of existing archival standards and approaches to integrate management of born-digital materials into the broader endeavor of keeping archives. Strategies for managing or incorporating digitized surrogates into archival finding aids will not be discussed in any detail. […]

Material Foundations of Map History, 1450–1900

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 1–6 June 2025
Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA
Fee: $1,495

Materiality is the foundation for the productive study of all aspects of maps and mapping, from the bibliographic to the interpretive to the digital. This course considers the widely variable material conditions of early maps to offer a new introduction to map history that counters the restrictive and flawed teleology inherent to “the history of cartography” or “historical cartography.” It does not presume any prior knowledge of maps and mapping and is suitable for graduate students and established scholars—including librarians, […]

Preservation Imaging: Science, Scholarship, and the Artifact

Utilizing non-invasive integrated digital imaging systems such as spectral imaging provides the scholar and researcher with a tool that can provide useful, hidden and unknown information about an artifact. When we look at a document, we do not usually see everything that is contained within the original material. The unaided eye often cannot detect features such as writing and inks that are erased, hidden by overwriting or varnish, or faded because of environmental factors; nor can it identify important provenance components such as colorants. These features on photographs, manuscripts, maps, and other materials are important for scholarly investigation, authentication, “fingerprinting” […]

Introduction to Archives for Special Collections Librarians, Booksellers & Collectors

Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 1–6 June 2025
Format: in person, Yale University in New Haven, CT
Fee: $1,495

Libraries with special collections increasingly collect, curate, and provide access to many forms of rare and archival materials within one integrated environment. Managers, curators, catalogers, and reference librarians whose education and experience have focused on published materials must therefore be conversant with archival issues and collection management strategies. Similarly, booksellers and collectors commonly find themselves handling material that may best be managed using archival principles. This course, […]

Visual Materials Cataloging

Need help with “hidden collections”? This course is intended for librarians and archivists who want to make visual material resources available and useful to researchers. The types of pictures we will consider range from eighteenth-century fine prints to born-digital photographs, from cartoons to posters, and from book illustrations to stereograph cards. The cataloging techniques we will use cover entire collections as well as single items. Specific topics include: description and transcription; subject indexing and form/genre access; the relationship between physical processing and cataloging; and establishing institutional priorities.

The core guideline is the new national standard Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Graphics). […]

Advanced Rare Book Cataloging Workshop

This course is intended for library catalogers who have mastered the basics of cataloging rare printed monographs according to Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books), and wish to solidify their expertise and receive specialized guidance in applying those skills. It is particularly suitable for those who have successfully completed Rare Book Cataloging (L-30).

The bulk of class time will be spent on full-level DCRM(B) cataloging of uncataloged rare printed monographs, using OCLC’s Connexion client, with plenty of opportunity for questions, discussions, and correction. The course is not advanced in the sense that students will be given especially problematic materials to catalog; […]