King's Collections

By Sara Belingheri, Library Services staff

I started my course in Promotion and Protection of Italian Cultural Heritage Abroad in March 2015. The degree is awarded by the University of Parma through ICoN (Italian Culture on the Net), a consortium of Italian Universities whose mission is the promotion and diffusion of Italian culture and the image of Italy worldwide using distance-learning tools. Classes are held by both academics and professionals from partner institutions, such as the National Cinema Museum of Turin or the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo Unico.

Due to the vocational focus of the program, students are required to carry out an internship, during which they have to design a conservation or promotion project on material or immaterial Italian cultural heritage.

I decided to ‘play a home match’, interning at the Foyle Special Collections Library and to work on Italian early printed books. As Italian is not among the languages taught at King’s, I wanted to find a theme that might be of interest to a hefty share of our academic community, beyond linguistic knowledge. While browsing the Maughan bookshelves I stumbled upon Globalization in world history edited by A. G. Hopkins, and decided to develop the theme of archaic globalization.

The first step was then to become familiar with the daily work and mission of the Special Collections through induction sessions held by colleagues. After that, I had to identify Italian books on the catalogue and Liz Serebriakoff of Business and Systems Support (and an Aleph expert!) came to my rescue, providing some spreadsheets with records extracted through ARC.

Of the hundreds of items detected, roughly 300 were printed before 1700, among which I had to select a subset of books relevant to the theme; after this skimming process I identified almost a dozen of promising items, mainly from the Marsden and Foreign and Commonwealth Office Historical Collections.

Having mined for my raw material, I had to decide what to do with it. After consultation with my internship supervisor Adam Ray and the Head of Special Collections Katie Sambrook, we agreed on designing posters using images from selected books, with these to be placed on stands around the Maughan Library. Each poster would carry the bibliographic data of the Special Collections item featured in it, plus the details of an item in the Maughan Library collection on the same subject, therefore creating a link between the two. The posters aim to make the presence of the Foyle Special Collections more visible to students visiting the library and possibly stimulate their curiosity about its holdings.

Three posters where produced. The first one showcases the voyages of the Florentine merchant Carletti, who completed a journey around the world in the early seventeenth century. Due to the nature of its binding, digitizing the first printed edition of Carletti’s reports proved to be too risky. We opted to reproduce a map of South America from a beautifully illustrated 1548 Venetian copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia instead. The second poster features the title page of a 1514 surgery treatise by papal physician Giovanni da Vigo, in which he describes the first known outbreak of syphilis in Europe. The last poster focuses on the spread of printing. The chosen image is a detail from a polyglot Psalter printed in Genoa in 1516, showing columns of Arabic and Aramaic text.

As we had to find a balance between aesthetics and relevance of the content, many quite interesting items could not be featured in the posters, but might find their space in further projects.

Please contact Sara Belingheri sara.belingheri@kcl.ac.uk for more information