CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois has received a grant of nearly a half million dollars to catalog rare Italian books and make them accessible to scholars.
The grant will pay for a project to catalog the library’s Cavagna Collection – a collection of more than 20,000 rare Italian imprints from the 16th through the 19th centuries.
The $498,942 grant – from the Council on Library and Information Resources, through its Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant program – is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The U. of I. Library’s project was one of 19 funded in 2014, out of 92 grant applications.
The library purchased the book collection in 1921 from the family of Count Antonio Cavagna Sangiuliani di Gualdana, a recognized authority on the local history of northern Italy.
Valerie Hotchkiss, the director of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, called the books “one of the world’s premier collections for Italian studies.” After the books were acquired, though, “many were just put on the shelves in the general stacks.” Some rare materials were boxed up.
“We knew they were a rich resource but we haven’t had the resources to catalog them until we got this grant,” Hotchkiss said. “It’s a hidden collection. It’s a collection we knew was here, we knew was important, but people never had the time and money to take care of it.”
Hotchkiss said the books are largely about northern Italian history, literature and theater, as well as items such as funeral speeches and wedding poems that will give a feeling of a city’s culture.
“Cavagna had a special love of mineral water,” she said. “There will be a history of several towns with mineral springs, early resort literature.”
The history of theater is “very strong in our collection overall,” she said. “Now we can include Italian drama as well.”
Some of the items in the collection are the only known copy of a book, or the only copy in North America. For example, the collection includes a document from 1750 of a well-known legal case in Italy, in which a husband writes a scathing account of the medical treatment received by his wife, who subsequently died. He was forced to burn most of the copies; the library’s copy is one of two copies that survived.
Most of the books and manuscripts are in Italian, but some are in French, Latin or German. Many were written in disappearing Italian dialects and are valuable to linguists. Hotchkiss said the books also will be of interest to those in Italian history, literature, law, theater and economics.
The library cataloged about 7,000 volumes as a pilot project, in preparation for the grant application.
“Those get used all the time,” Hotchkiss said. “We get calls from Italy, we get calls from around the U.S., so we know if we can make them accessible, they will be used.”
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library uses graduate students and recent graduates to gather the information from each item to make it accessible to someone searching in a variety of ways. The emphasis is on doing the work as quickly as possible, and with students and recent graduates trained in rare book cataloging, it is “extremely economical,” Hotchkiss said.
The cataloging work will start in January. The cataloged collection will be digitized.
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Illinois is the principal repository for early manuscripts, rare books and literary manuscripts in the broad fields of literature, history, art, theology, technology, theater and the natural sciences.
The Council on Library and Information Resources is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.
