ITALYA Books: The Project and Its Initial Achievements

ITALYA Books is a partnership between the National Central Library of Rome (BNCR), the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy and the National Library of Israel. It aims to create a unified searchable catalogue of every Hebrew printed book in Italy, held in collections in both public and private libraries, from the beginning of the printing era to the twentieth century. The project includes books from the second half of the XV° century to the XX° century.

Hebrew books are an important testimony of Jewish life in Italy and of the development of Hebrew printing across Europe. It is estimated that there are many uncatalogued collections of relatively rare old books.

This ambitious undertaking is making accessible Italian Hebrew book holdings in Jewish communities and selected state collections estimated 35,000 volumes from 52 collections across Italy, and bringing them into an integrated standardized listing hosted online by the BNCR`s Theca Digital Library.

The Theca digital library shows for each volume, in addition to data on the authors, title, edition, year and place of printing, some digital photos of the identifying and relevant pages: cover, colophon, pages inside the volume, as well as evidence of censorship notes, marginalia and provenance. The Theca contains cataloguing data in Hebrew and Latin characters. Currently it contains already 10.000 volumes and the work of cataloguing is in progress. Among them, rare volumes have been identified as defined by the cataloguing department in the NLI and some were absent from the NLI central catalogue.

As part of the project process, innovative methodologies were developed to enable coordination between the partners and the cataloguing team in Italy and Israel.

The session will present this new unified online catalogue and demonstrate the benefits it offers for researchers of Italian Printed Book Heritage.