North American Imprints Program
The North American Imprints Program (NAIP) has as
its long-term goal the creation of a highly detailed and sophisticated
machine-readable catalog of all books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed
through the year 1876 in what are now the United States and Canada. The
NAIP catalog is not limited to items held by the American Antiquarian
Society, but attempts to described extant items wherever they may be
found.
An undertaking as ambitious as this will necessarily be accomplished
incrementally. The NAIP catalog contains over 40,000 records descriptive
of 17th- and 18th- century imprints, and records the locations of more
than 120,000 extant copies. (Of these 40,000 imprints, some 23,000 are
held by the American Antiquarian Society). NAIP efforts are now focused
on the 19th century. For now, we are cataloging only materials held by
AAS, and have deferred the cataloging of materials held by other
libraries. AAS holdings for the decade of the 1820s are fully
cataloged; a National Endowment for the Humanities grant underwrites
the cataloging of holdings for the 1830s. (Some 37,000 records
descriptive of the microform versions of the American imprints,
1801-1819, are available in the catalog, and will in time be brought in
line with NAIP records.) Other NEH grants, past and present, have
enabled us to catalog the Society's collection of American children's
books, 1821-1876, and the collection of American broadsides through
1870.
NAIP records are available in the Society's online catalog. This catalog is
uniquely suited to the task of making NAIP records available to
researchers: in addition to providing the sorts of access common to most
online catalogs (author, title, subject, and keyword access), the catalog
supports a host of specialized indexes, providing access by genre, by
series, by illustrator, by printed, publisher, and bookseller, by place,
date, and language of publication. Provenance information is noted and
indexed, and a special index permits the user to search using a variety of
terms describing physical characteristics of the book. The researcher may
use this index to identify annotated copies, copies containing owners'
bookplates or labels, and copies containing owners' verses. Single records
and groups of records may be printed, passed to a disk, or electronically
mailed over the Internet.
- Alan N. Degutis, Head of Cataloging
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