Materiały do stanu zbiorów starych druków w Polsce

Abstrakt

One of the planned tasks of the Provenance Working Group (coordinated by the Ossoliński National Institute) for 2018 was to compile a list of libraries with early printed books in their collections. The main objective was to disseminate information about institutions having books printed in the fifteenth–eighteenth centuries in their collections, which in turn would provide scholars studying early printed books in Poland with an insight into the current situation. Common access to the current and, as far as possible, complete data about these collections remains a proposal of librarians from the previous century that is yet to be implemented. The compilation presented here, based largely on public domain data as well as data from printed publications, is an expanded version of the compilation mentioned above. In its present form the material contains a table featuring information about over 369 institutions with early printed books in their holdings in Poland, located in over 163 towns and cities. They include the biggest collections as well as smaller holdings of academic and public libraries or libraries of church institutions, museums and archives all over the country. For most of these sites it has been possible to find, in addition to their current addresses, more or less basic data about their collections of early printed books. Another objective of the present publication — in addition to presenting information about the location and size of the collections — is to examine the condition and quality of information about them. There is still a lot to be done in this respect. Therefore, it is to be hoped that the material presented here will become an inspiration for a verification of the data collected in it as well as a discussion about a common methodology for creating a comprehensive and as complete as possible guide to early printed books in Poland.