Last week I talked about what things the Spanish National Library keeps save. Apart from books it also keeps: photos, maps, music sheets, bibliographies, etc.
All of this, it’s important information, but there is a book that can help you find everything about one topic in one place. A bibliography. You can find bibliographies in all libraries, they all have them.
Before google made ours lives so much easier; how did people find what they were looking for?
They looked for what they needed in bibliographies.
Think about a doctor in the early 1900s how did he find a journal that someone else wrote?
Looking at bibliographies. There wasn’t any internet back then to help them out!
What is a bibliography?
Bibliography comes from Ancient Greek words biblion meaning book and grafien meaning writing, writing about books. The modern meaning is to compile a list of books and describe them.
There are different types of bibliographies: national, or specific to one topic, about books or just scientific journals, universal ones.
These type of books help people in the past and nowadays too to find everything about a topic. Looking at a bibliography they could decide what book they wanted to borrow or if they needed more than one source to look at. This specially helps scientists.
Did you know when was the first bibliography written?
The first one was a simple one, it was made long ago. There are two Sumerian clay tablets from the second millennium B.C.
After that the Callimachus´ pinakes third century B.C. of the Great Library of Alexandria. (They are also consider the first catalogue).
The first Universal Bibliography.
The first universal bibliography is written by Conrad Guessner in 1545. At that time it was easier to write an universal bibliography because there wasn’t that many books. The first printing press was only invented a century before.
If we think about all the books that are printed today, it would almost be impossible to do it. However with the technology that we now have makes the task a little easier.
Each country is in charged of doing their own national bibliographies, then they are shared internationally.
So if you haven’t got internet one day, go to a library a find a bibliography to help you out!
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