Creating a National Bibliographic Past: The Institute for Hebrew Bibliography

Abstract

The mission of the Institute for Hebrew Bibliography (IHB), located at the Jewish and National University Library (JNUL) in Jerusalem from the early 1960s to the present, is to describe all of the books printed in Hebrew characters since the invention of printing to 1960. The ambitious scope of the project was set only after discussions between historians and catalogers. The IHB created two card catalogs, one for bibliographic descriptions, and a second for biographies of Hebrew authors. The release, in 1994, of The Bibliography of the Hebrew Book CD-ROM, followed in 2002 by an Internet-accessible database (updated in 2004), are benchmarks that allow the public to assess the work of the IHB. Technological advances can be used to deliver a clean and easily searchable database only when basic concepts of cataloging/database retrieval have been fully addressed. THE ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT (1953–1959) The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 made feasible the project of a Jewish national bibliography, similar to the national bibliographies of Western Europe that were produced during the nineteenth century in Great Britain, Germany, and France. National bibliographies aim at unifying a territory and a language, recording all the books published within the borders of one nation. In the case of the Hebrew bibliography, the state, Israel, undertook a retrospective national bibliography, aiming at describing all Hebrew books issued since the invention of printing until 1960, anywhere. Achieving this ambitious goal was possible only because during the post-World War II decades publicly funded teams of researchers replaced the individual bibliographer, often toiling on a single work for decades (Malcles 1977). The suggestion for a Jewish national bibliography came in 1953 from Dr. Israel Mehlmann (1900–1989) (Rubin 1993/1994; [Mif‘al] 1964, p. 7, 45). Between 1954 and 1959, Dr. Mehlman attempted to convince major Israeli ac a -