International Medieval Bibliography

Last updated
International Medieval Bibliography
Producer University of Leeds
History1967-present
LanguagesEnglish, French, German, Italian, Spanish
Access
Providers Brepols
CostSubscription
Coverage
DisciplinesArchaeology, architecture, art history, canon law, crusades, daily life, ecclesiastical history, economics, education, epigraphy, geography, hagiography, Hebrew and Jewish studies, heraldry, humanism, Islam, language, law, literature, liturgy, manuscripts and palaeography, maritime studies, medicine, military history, monasticism, music, numismatics, onomastics, philosophy, politics and diplomacy, printing history, science, social history, technology, theology, and more
Record depthIndex and abstract
Format coverageIndividual articles in journals, Festschriften, conference proceedings, collected essays, exhibition catalogues
Temporal coverageAD 300-1500
Geospatial coverageEurope, Middle East, North Africa
No. of records472,000+ article records, 3,200+ journals
Print edition
Print titleInternational Medieval Bibliography: Multidisciplinary Bibliography of the Middle Ages
ISSN 0020-7950
Links
Website www.brepolis.net

The International Medieval Bibliography (IMB) is a multidisciplinary bibliographic database covering Europe, North Africa and the Middle East for the entire period from AD 300 to 1500. [1] It aims to provide a comprehensive, current bibliography of articles in journals and miscellany volumes (conference proceedings, essay collections or Festschriften) published worldwide in over 35 different languages. The organisation and publication of the IMB is a collaboration between the University of Leeds and the Belgian publisher Brepols.

Contents

As of 2011, the database comprised over 400,000 article records on every aspect of the Middle Ages, with over 16,000 new records being added annually in quarterly updates. [2] A printed annual update of new records is published twice a year.

Around 2012, the IMB and Brepols joined forces with the Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale (BCM), based at the University of Poitiers, [3] and it is possible to use a joint interface to search for articles in the IMB and monographs in the BCM. [4]

History

The IMB was founded in 1967 by Peter H. Sawyer, then at the University of Leeds but visiting the University of Minnesota, with the support of the Medieval Academy of America [5] [6] and funding from the University of Minnesota and the McKnight Foundation of Minnesota. [4] Early volumes appeared annually and each contained around 3,000 records. [7]

Until the 1990s, the IMB was produced and its subscriptions managed entirely at Leeds University, with printing and distribution handled by the Leeds printing house Maney. Around 1987, however, the then editor Katie Cubitt decided that the bibliography should be digitised. The Belgian publisher Brepols won the tender, publishing a digitised version of the IMB on CD in 1995, and a close relationship between the IMB, Leeds's Institute for Medieval Studies, and Brepols formed; [4] from 1996-97 Brepols took on both online and print publication of the IMB, with data creation remaining with the Institute for Medieval Studies. [8]

Its editorial staff is based at the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Leeds. As of 2011, the project was supported by around 70 academic contributors from all over the world. [9] As of 2017, the project claimed eighty contributors, over 500,000 records, adding 16,000 records per year. [7] [4]

From 1995 to 2020, the IMB was home to the Bulletin of International Medieval Research, edited by Alan V. Murray. In 2020, it was announced that the Bulletin and Leeds Studies in English would merge to become Leeds Medieval Studies. [10]

Ethos

While many disciplines, such as the sciences and medicine, publish their research predominantly online and in English, a very large proportion of research in the disciplines relevant to Medieval Studies is still published in print (or print plus electronic versions) and in a wide variety of languages. The IMB aims to include publications from all disciplines and languages, focusing on those which represent the newest research and which are not separately catalogued by libraries, i.e. articles in periodicals and essays or papers in conference proceedings, Festschriften and exhibition catalogues.

The geographical scope was originally restricted to Christian Europe, but has gradually been extended to include North Africa and the Near East for the entire medieval period, so that it now also forms an important resource for the Islamic heritage as well as the cultures of Christianity, Judaism and the various European pagan religions. [11]

Using the IMB

The IMB provides a comprehensive cataloguing and indexing system to help users find articles relevant to their research. Full bibliographical details of publications covered in the IMB are given in a primary entry. In addition, each article is given a "three-dimensional" classification covering general subject (the academic discipline which best relates to its content), geographical area and century/centuries. Many articles are also provided with a brief abstract when the article title is not enough to give the reader an idea of its content. Each article is also given 3-8 keywords, which constitute a controlled vocabulary and allow enhanced search possibilities in addition to unstructured, free searches. In the user interface these index terms can be accessed in the form of browse lists. There are over 120,000 index terms, which are divided into five categories:

  1. Placenames (including geographical features)
  2. Medieval countries and peoples
  3. Personal names (covering names of individuals, families and dynasties, modern scholars and titles of texts)
  4. Keywords (e.g. agriculture, jewellery, sigillography, etc.)
  5. Manuscripts and archival holdings.

Each category is treated as an authority list, which is continually being refined and expanded by the editors. A hierarchical index offers an integrated tree structure comprising some 1,500 subject terms. This allows the user to navigate from nine major conceptual areas through to the specific subject terminology employed in medieval scholarship. A parallel index of places allows step-by-step navigation from major geographical areas to over 50,000 different names of places, regions and geographical features in Europe, North Africa and the Near East. For example, users can click through from British Isles > England > West Yorkshire > Leeds > Kirkstall Abbey.

The IMB is OpenURL-compatible, so that the use of digital object identifiers (DOI) with individual article records means that users can go directly to records in a local or external library catalogue, request a copy from a document supply service or, where their library has a subscription to the publication in question, go directly to a full text version of the article. Export functionality allows users to save and refine the results of searches and so construct their own bibliographies, and email alerts can be set up for new publications which conform to users' preferred search criteria.

Details on how to subscribe to the IMB are available on the Brepols website, along with information and YouTube video tutorials on how to get started.

Editors

1967-1969 Peter H. Sawyer and Robert S. Hoyt
1970-1971 Pauline A. Stafford
1972-1973Patricia Neal
1974-1985Richard J. Walsh
1986-1987Catherine Cubitt
1988-1995 Simon Forde
1996-presentAlan V. Murray

See also

Related Research Articles

Bibliography Organized listing of books and the systematic description of them as objects

Bibliography, as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology. English author and bibliographer John Carter describes bibliography as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author ; the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects".

The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an online database of over 16 million astronomy and physics papers from both peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed sources. Abstracts are available free online for almost all articles, and full scanned articles are available in Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and Portable Document Format (PDF) for older articles. It was developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and is managed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications, patents, books, etc. In contrast to library catalogue entries, a large proportion of the bibliographic records in bibliographic databases describe articles, conference papers, etc., rather than complete monographs, and they generally contain very rich subject descriptions in the form of keywords, subject classification terms, or abstracts.

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale

Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, commonly known by its acronym RILM, is a nonprofit organization that offers digital collections and advanced tools for locating research on all topics related to music. Its mission is "to make this knowledge accessible to research and performance communities worldwide….to include the music scholarship of all countries, in all languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries, thereby fostering research in the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences." Central to RILM's work and mission is the international bibliography of scholarship relating to all facets of music research.

Social Sciences Citation Index Citation index product of Clarivate Analytics

The Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) is a commercial citation index product of Clarivate Analytics. It was originally developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index. The Social Sciences Citation Index is a multidisciplinary index which indexes over 3,400 journals across 58 social science disciplines – 1985 to present, and it has 122 million cited references - 1900 to present. It also includes a range of 3,500 selected items from some of the world's finest scientific and technical journals. It has a range of useful search functions such as ‘cited reference searching’, searching by author, subject, or title. Whilst the Social Sciences Citation Index provides extensive support in bibliographic analytics and research, a number of academic scholars have expressed criticisms relating to ideological bias and it's English-dominant publishing nature.

Index Medicus (IM) is a curated subset of MEDLINE, which is a bibliographic database of life science and biomedical science information, principally scientific journal articles. From 1879 to 2004, Index Medicus was a comprehensive bibliographic index of such articles in the form of a print index or its onscreen equivalent. Medical history experts have said of Index Medicus that it is “America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge.”

CSA was a division of Cambridge Information Group and provider of online databases, based in Bethesda, Maryland before merging with ProQuest of Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2007. CSA hosted databases of abstracts and developed taxonomic indexing of scholarly articles. These databases were hosted on the CSA Illumina platform and were available alongside add-on products like CSA Illustrata. The company produced numerous bibliographic databases in different fields of the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and technology. Thus, coverage included materials science, environmental sciences and pollution management, biological sciences, aquatic sciences and fisheries, biotechnology, engineering, computer science, sociology, linguistics, and other areas.

Web of Science Online subscription index of citations

The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines. It was originally produced by the Institute for Scientific Information. It is currently owned by Clarivate.

National and University Library in Zagreb National library of Croatia and central library of the University of Zagreb

National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) is the national library of Croatia and central library of the University of Zagreb.

The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) is a bibliography for social science and interdisciplinary research. The database focuses on the social science disciplines of anthropology, economics, politics and sociology, and related interdisciplinary subjects, such as development studies, human geography and environment and gender studies. It was established in 1951 and prepared by the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques in Paris. Production was transferred to the London School of Economics in 1989, and then to ProQuest in 2010.

Anthropological Literature (AL) is an online database of citations to journal articles and articles in edited volumes and symposia held by the Tozzer Library, the anthropology library at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

<i>Leeds Studies in English</i> Academic journal

Leeds Studies in English was an annual academic journal dedicated to the study of medieval English, Old Norse-Icelandic, and Anglo-Norman language and literature. It was published by the School of English at the University of Leeds. In 2020, it was announced that Leeds Studies in English would merge with the Bulletin of International Medieval Research to become Leeds Medieval Studies, based in the Leeds Institute for Medieval Studies.

Philosophy Documentation Center

The Philosophy Documentation Center (PDC) is a non-profit publisher and resource center that provides access to scholarly materials in applied ethics, classics, philosophy, religious studies, and related disciplines. It publishes academic journals, conference proceedings, anthologies, and online research databases, often in cooperation with scholarly and professional associations. It also provides membership management and electronic publishing services, and hosts electronic journals, series, and other publications from several countries.

Trove Australian online library database aggregator

Trove is an Australian online library database aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool. The database includes archives, images, newspapers, official documents, archived websites, manuscripts and other types of data. Hosted by the National Library of Australia in partnership with content providers, including members of the National and State Libraries Australia, it is one of the most well-respected and accessed GLAM services in Australia, with over 70,000 daily users.

CAB Direct is a source of references for the applied life sciences It incorporates two bibliographic databases: CAB Abstracts and Global Health. CAB Direct is an access point for multiple bibliographic databases produced by CABI. This database contains 8.8 million bibliographic records, which includes 85,000 full text articles. It also includes noteworthy literature reviews. News articles and reports are also part of this combined database.

Bibliography of Music Literature International bibliography of literature on music

The Bibliography of Music Literature is an international bibliography of literature on music. It considers all kind of music and includes both current and older literature. Since 1968, the BMS editorial staff has also been working as the German committee for the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM). The bibliography includes monographs, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, articles and reviews from journals, Festschriften, conference proceedings, yearbooks, anthologies, and essays from critical reports. It contains printed media as well as online resources, data media, sound recordings, audiovisual media, and microforms. Each record provides the title in the original language, full bibliographic data, a keyword index, and mostly an abstract. Currently, BMS online has more than 315,000 records of literature on music. It is supplemented by the OLC-SSG Musicology, which incorporates the contents of some more 150 music journals from 1993 onward. BMS online participates actively on Virtual Library of Musicology (ViFaMusik), the central gateway for music and musicology in Germany.

The Bibliographie de civilisation médiévale (BCM) is a multidisciplinary bibliographic database covering Europe, North Africa and the Middle East for the entire period from AD 300 to 1500. It aims to provide a comprehensive, current bibliography of monographs and listings of miscellany volumes published worldwide between 1958 and 2009. This way, it is compatible with the International Medieval Bibliography, which focuses on individual articles in journals and miscellany volumes.

The Index Theologicus (IxTheo) is an international scientific open access bibliography for theology and religious studies.

Institute for Medieval Studies, Leeds

The Institute for Medieval Studies (IMS) at the University of Leeds, founded in 1967, is a leading research and teaching institute in the field of medieval studies. It is home to the International Medieval Bibliography and the International Medieval Congress.

Simon Forde is a publisher and medievalist, noted as the former editor of the International Medieval Bibliography and founder of the International Medieval Congress.

References

  1. ↑ "International Medieval Bibliography" . Retrieved 3 November 2011.
  2. ↑ "Brepols Database Information" . Retrieved 3 November 2011.
  3. ↑ "International Medieval Bibliography", Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 17-18 (2012), 105-7.
  4. 1 2 3 4 'The History of the IMB: 1967-2017', 50 Years of Medieval Studies at Leeds (2017).
  5. ↑ Sawyer, Peter (2009). "The Origins of the International Medieval Bibliography: Its Unwritten History (as told by its Founder)". Bulletin of International Medieval Research. 14 for 2008: 57–61.
  6. ↑ Macartney, Hilary (2007). "La International Medieval Bibliography como herramienta de investigación para la historiografía de ciudades medievales y sus territorios". La Ciudad medieval y su influencia territorial: Nájera. Encuentros Internacionales del Medievo 3, 2006: 439–450.
  7. 1 2 'International Medieval Bibliography', 50 Years of Medieval Studies at Leeds (2017).
  8. ↑ Simon Forde, 'Digitisation of the IMB', 50 Years of Medieval Studies at Leeds (21 June 2018).
  9. ↑ "IMB Contributors" . Retrieved 3 November 2011.
  10. ↑ Alaric Hall, 'Editorial Note', Leeds Studies in English, n. s. 49 (2018), [iii].
  11. ↑ Murray, Alan V. (2001). "Thirty-Five Years of the International Medieval Bibliography (1967-2002)". Bulletin of International Medieval Research. 7: 1–9.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.