The 2024 CERL Annual Seminar will take place in Rome, National Central Library, on 23 October 2024 on the subject of European Printing in Non-Latin Scripts.

16 papers on technology, collections and cataloguing will be accompanied by over 20 posters from more collections and projects.

The Senior Librarian of the Gennadius Library Irini Solomonidi will be speaking on Greek typograph with colleagues from the Laskaridis and the Onassis foundations.

Attendance is free, but please register at secretariat@cerl.org

The seminar will be broadcast live on YouTube. Watch it here 

Description of the Seminar

Printing technologies have historically been used worldwide to reproduce texts written in different languages and scripts. When European typography developed in the mid-fifteenth century, this technology was first utilized to manufacture books written in Latin and European vernaculars. However, printers soon begun to publish texts in Hebrew (from 1469), Greek (from 1471), Glagolitic (from 1483), Cyrillic (from 1491). The earliest edition in Armenian dates to 1512, in Ge’ez to 1513, in Arabic to 1514, in Syriac to 1539, in Gaelic to 1571.

During the sixteenth century, starting in Rome and spreading in Europe, substantial investments in technology and knowledge are behind the development of a range of non-Latin types for the production of material for global circulation.

Nowadays, European and American Libraries are home to extensive holdings of early books printed in non-Latin scripts in Europe. These publications are housed alongside significant collections of books printed in numerous regions of the world and in a range of languages and different writing systems, which entered the current institutions following a variety of historical (political, religious, economical, as well as cultural) events.

The forthcoming 2024 CERL Annual Seminar organised by Cristina Dondi (Consortium of European Research Libraries – CERL), Andrea Cappa (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Roma – BNCR) and Alessandro Bianchi (Cambridge University Library – CUL) will focus on printed books in non-Latin scripts, exploring three main themes:

Technology – The European production of books printed in non-Latin scripts; the models, the people, and the motivations which enabled the casting of special sets of type to represent multiple writing systems.

Collections – Notable collections of books printed in various non-Latin scripts currently housed in European and American institutions.

Cataloguing – Current/traditional cataloguing practices; discoverability of data and information; Cataloguing standards, codes (Marc code, Ethnologue ISO code), and their use.