Welcome to the Book Arts Research Database
The Book Arts Research Database (BARD) began with UICB faculty member Julia Leonard’s desire to make visible all makers (many often not credited) who took part in crafting a single book—and to design a means to search for books that demonstrated a particular material, process or structure. To start, a list of terms (that has undergone many revisions) was created. Karen Carcia joined the endeavor as a collaborator and Matt Arant at the UI Graduate College built a test database that served for many years as the repository for researched data. With grant support from the Center for Craft, the UI Arts & Humanities Initiative, UI International Programs, the UI Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, and the UI Center for the Book, and the help of many individuals, we are ready to launch the project.
About the Database
The Book Arts Research Database (BARD) is designed to make the large collection of book arts materials held at the University of Iowa’s Special Collections more accessible to faculty, students, makers, and researchers by providing them with a multi-pronged search function. As faculty in a book art program using a library with an extensive book art collection, we noted difficulties in locating items that met our specialized needs—for instance, we wanted to search for certain types of bindings, or methods of printing—however, these types of terms are not often available through the general library catalog. So, we set out to create a database that would make locating book art materials held in the closed stacks easier to identify. BARD allows users to locate items by selecting specific terminology terms encompassing the processes, materials, and structures that are commonly used by book artists. Users can also search for the names of 14 types of contributors involved in the creation of a book including binders, papermakers, typesetters, and writers. Search results will include all the books or other items containing any of the terminology, creators, or publication information. From there users can select individual item results, where publication data, creator data, means of production, a brief description, and photographs of the object are displayed.
Our Staff
We have been lucky enough to work with the following people who brought their excitement, generosity and good, hard questions to the project to help shape it. Many thanks to our researchers Maria Carolina Ceballos, Jocmarys Viruet Feliciano, Colleen Ferketish, Hannah Hacker, Sara Luz Jensen, India Johnson, Andrea Kohashi, Isabella Myers, Diane Ray, Mariana Tejeda, Camila de Urioste Laborde, and, Katie Wollan; most excellent photographer Jenna Bonistalli; UI Libraries staff Giselle Simon, Lindsay Moen, Mark Anderson, Jenny Bradshaw, Margaret Gamm, and the many librarians and student workers who pulled book after book for us; and our patient and imaginative IT Application Developers Ted Fitzgerald, Jason Lin, Dustin McMains, and Robert Ramsey. Thanks to Marnie Powers-Torrey for initiating our collaboration involving her descriptive vocabulary project Opening Artist Books. And finally, gratitude to our colleagues at the UI Center for the Book for their advice and support, and to our Program Assistant, Kathleen Tandy, for helping us keep all our ducks in a row!
How to Use the Database
There are two components to the search page, the keyword search query and the index.
Keyword or Search Query
Here users can input any subject or term they want to find. The keyword function will be helpful if the term you are searching for is not included in the index search. Note: if the term is in the index, a keyword search will not yield results.
The database also includes a descriptive paragraph for each item. Any words used in these descriptions will also show up in a keyword search. In addition to offering a fuller (holistic) sense of the book, these paragraphs often illuminate specifics in a book that are not identified by the index terms. If you are looking for something seldom used in a bookwork, it would likely be included in these descriptions (for example, a found object, an uncommon material or image-making technique, or a rare papermaking fiber).
The keyword search is also where users may search basic bibliographic information by call number, title, makers/creators, press names, publishers. Makers or creators included in the data are the following:
The initial search will display all possible matches. On that initial results page the user will find a list of matches displaying the book title, photographs, and a description. Clicking on any title will take the user to the detailed page for that item. There one finds zoomable photographs, Publication Information, Contributors, and Terms, as well as a link to the University of Iowa Libraries catalog entry.
Index: List of Search Terms
The index is a list of terms arranged by six categories: Materials, Process/Technique, Papermaking Traditions, Structure/Physical Format, Enclosure, Genre/Form. On the initial search page, these categories are found under the filter buttons on the left side of the screen. Users may select multiple terms in each category. Keep in mind that the more terms selected, the narrower the search results. In the event there are no matches, consider beginning with fewer terms at once.
These lists are a way for newcomers to the field to browse and learn about the many terms included and a way for experienced book artists to become familiar with terms included in the database. We have teamed up with Opening Artists’ Books to help provide users with both textual and visual definitions of the terms used. Opening Artists' Books is a project undertaken at the Marriott Libraries, University of Utah. It is building a common descriptive vocabulary for the book arts. Our listed terms will take you to the OAB where you will find definitions as well as related terms and images to illustrate each term. In cases where the OAB has not defined a term, we provide a definition in the Index. Some of these definitions have been taken from other sources noted in the Index.
Contact Us
BARD is an on-going project. The work that goes into cataloging a single book takes careful observation and attention from trained researchers. At the launch of this webpage, we have approximately 500 artist books cataloged—there are over 3000 in this growing collection. The process is slow, but steady. Our goal is to identify the elements of each book accurately. To this end, we provide larger 'umbrella' terms (like “relief printing”) as well as more specific terms (such as “woodblock printing” or “letterpress printing (type)”), allowing a researcher the option of choosing a more general term when unable to determine greater specificity.
As with many of the books in our database, BARD is a collaborative project. We want to hear from users; what works and what doesn't. Please reach out to us with questions or comments.
If you were involved with any entry and notice a mistake, or have more information to add to an entry, please get in touch with us.