Book collectors, rare book dealers, and special collections librarians depend heavily upon bibliographies – books on books – for the identification of specific editions, establishing provenance and value, and for the cataloguing of their collections. Many of the classical bibliographic reference works are currently out of print and almost as difficult to obtain as the rarities they themselves index. Rarebooks.info, a “digital library of reference works on rare books” as its masthead proclaims, is a subscription service that fills a need in a very specific market in the book trade by offering full‐text searchable versions of over eighty bibliographies on a wide array of subjects that range in date from the mid‐1800s to the twenty‐first century. Co‐directors Michel Demont and Sandra Hindman, both rare books experts with many years of experience dealing with the history of printing and book production, created the site in 2001. In the last decade they have overseen the growth of the site and assembled an international advisory team to assist them in developing a reference database that will benefit dealers, cataloguers, reference librarians, and scholars seeking analytical and descriptive bibliographic information on both American and European titles.
The database is selective, but offers some modern standards such as modern Oak Knoll Press titles and many unique early bibliographies such as Hebrew books in the Bodleian Library and books on Sir Isaac Newton. Its coverage is especially heavy in European titles, particularly French and some Italian and German bibliographies on literary topics (for example, listings of French first editions from 1400‐1700), geographical regions (a 1904 bibliography of books on China or a bibliography of early books on Hawaii), and other topics. Many are bibliographies of books from the libraries of specific collectors or institutions, some well‐known and some obscure, and there are some classic titles such as Joseph Sabin's monumental bibliography of books on the Americas and others. What makes this bibliographic cabinet of curiosities distinctive is its fully functional search engine and the clear page images that allow users to search across the reference collection and retrieve results that otherwise require lengthy consultation of print sources. New titles are being added to the collection, and MARC records are available to subscribers to add records for these e‐books in their online catalogues.
The search interface has both a basic and advanced mode which are somewhat limited in their options, but still relatively easy to use and sufficient for most researchers. The basic search box has a drop‐down menu for implied Boolean searching: all of the terms, any of the terms, phrase, and adjacency (within five terms). There is no option to search for title or author fields in the database records. The Search Index option lets users search the whole collection (“global”) or specific bibliographies. The fuzzy search option, which can be set from zero to four, can help with variant spellings, always a necessity when looking for early printed works, and there are sort options for the results (alphabetical or by relevance). The advanced search differs from basic by enabling users to select multiple bibliographies for the search index and by allowing users to enter topics using the topical index developed by the database creators (which consists of broad topic areas such as Americana, Cooking, Cultural and Area Studies, Judaica, Natural History, Theology, and others).
Perhaps the most common form of search the average use of this database would perform is a search for a specific author and specific work in order to find bibliographic information on an edition to verify details about a certain edition or impression. A search on the keywords “Stendhal” and “rouge” and “noir” (for early editions of Stendhal's novel) yields 73 hits, some of which are somewhat tangential, but several hits are descriptive bibliographic entries on nineteenth‐century editions of the work from the 1914 Bibliographiestendhalienne. The page images are in jpeg format, not PDF, and users can adjust the magnification level. A “print this page” link allows users to print the page itself without the external wrapping of the Web page. The ability to consult multiple bibliographies from different periods makes this a powerful reference tool for those seeking in‐depth bibliographic information.
Rarebooks.info also provides Browse Works and Browse Topics tabs so that users can peruse the individual titles in the collection and then perform keyword searches within those titles. The search history feature is a useful addition to help with complex research queries. The home page of the site has help screens with screenshots, and a “learning” section containing a glossary of bibliographic terms and links of interest to the rare book dealers and beginners. The links to rare book schools, museums, and professional organizations will be of interest to librarians and other professionals. This site will be a worthwhile supplement to the specialized print bibliographies and other reference database tools for libraries supporting a rare book collection or for individuals in the rare book trade.
