Early Bookowners in Britain
About this Database
The British History of books, which started in the early Middles Ages and continues to date, comprises not only the establishment of printed books in Great Britain, but also the import and buying of them. The private ownership of printed books is up to now a barely investigated question. Margaret Lane Ford addresses herself to this task in respect of the private ownership of printed books in the late 15th and early 16th century. For a contribution to The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain she has gathered evidences of provenances for the time period in question from over 4300 printed works in the past, books in private ownership had a high practical value and were of importance for the professionalism. Classical and theological texts were indispensable for the university-educated and the students, while technical works were needed by merchants and handcrafters.
Searching EBOB
EBOB offers a sophisticated search interface for running simple searches as well complex queries against the database.The database is available here.
Fulltext Search
Like most search engines and similar databases, full text queries can be made by simply typing one or more search term into the search field. Multiple terms will be combined by a logical AND. Further supported logical operators are OR and NOT. Parentheses can be used for grouping.
| aristoteles ethica | will retrieve records that contain the words aristoteles and ethica in any of their fields. |
| “ethica ad nicomachum” | will retrieve records that contain these word in exact this word order (phrase search) |
| aristoteles and ethica not paris | will retrieve records that contain the words “aristoteles” and “ethica” but not the word “paris” |
| aristoteles and ethica not (paris or oxford) | will retrieve records that contain the words “aristoteles” and “ethica” but neither “paris” nor “oxford” |
Index Search
Searches can be limited to certain fields or groups of fields within the record by adding a qualifier to the search term. The following qualifiers are supported:
| author: | author of the edition described or of a work bound together with this edition. |
| title: | title proper of the edition or a work bound together with the edition |
| owner: | personal or corporate former owner of a copy |
| publisher: | Any word from the imprint statement (i.e. place or name of the publisher) |
| subject: | Subject category of the work described. |
| identifier: | EBOB-Identifier of either an edition or a copy. |
| ownid: | owner id (esp. for linking from other sources |
Please note that a qualifier is always related to the term or phrase directly following. If you want to search for multiple terms within the same index, use parentheses:
| title:ethica | retrieves records, where “ethica” occurs within a title statement |
| title:“ethica ad nicomachum” | retrieves records with “ethica ad nicomachum” occurring within a title statement |
| title:(ethica nicomachum) | retrieves records where the words “ethica” and “nicomachum” occur within a title statement |
| title:(ethica or poetica) | retrieves records where either “ethica” or “poetica” occurs in a title statement |
Wildcards and Regular Expressions
Wildcards can be used within a term or as right or left truncation. * stands for an arbitrary number of characters (zero or many), ? for exact one character.
More sophisticated pattern based searches can be done by using regular expressions see here for further information. Forward slashes are used as delimiters. Please note that POSIX character classes are not (yet) supported.
| /joh?annes/ | searches for “joannes” or “johannes” |
Fuzzy and Proximity Search
To add fuzziness to your search term, use the ~ operator. Per default fuzzy search returns hits, whichs' similarity to the search term can be described by a Levenshtein distance of 2. You may alter the desired Levenshtein distance by adding the value to the ~-Operator.
| ethica~ | retrieves records which contain words that are similar to “ethica” in a way that up to 2 characters within the words might be different (Levenshtein-distance of 2) |
| ethica~1 | retrieves records which contain words with a similarity to “ethica” mesured by a Levenshtein-distance of 1 |
Use the ~ operator with a phrase to formulate a proximity search.
| “ethica nicomachum”~3 | retrieves records where the the words “ethica” and “nicomachum” appear in that order max. 3 words apart from each other. Or in the order “nicomachum” followed by “ethica” max. 2 words apart. |
