The British Library, with contributions from institutions worldwide. Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC): The International Database of 15th-century European Printing. Database.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Begun in 1980, the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) seeks to record every item of European printing from movable type (not from engraved plates or woodblocks) to 1501.As of August 2016, the database contained records of 30,518 editions, which includes an unspecified number of sixteenth-century items that had been erroneously listed in previous incunabula catalogues as belonging to the fifteenth century.The audience for the ISTC is anyone interested in incunabula, the history of the book, the history of printing, the economics of the publishing industry or book trade in its infancy, the history of literacy, and any other field of study that relies in whole or in part on data concerning early printed books.The ISTC is part of the Heritage of the Printed Book (HPB) database of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), which extends to the end of the hand-press era, ca.1830.The ISTC is exceedingly easy to use.Any search term or combination of keywords will gain the user access to the standard (and standardized) bibliographic information about each edition, including links to any digital online facsimiles available, as well as information on all known extant copies of that edition and their geographical location.The catalogue employs standard names for printers, authors, and places, which are referred to by their contemporary English names.Should a user wish to be more systematic in searching the ISTC, CERL via the help button at the bottom of the ISTC home page offers a brief introduction to the process and provides a list of additional terms that can be combined using Boolean operators.The terms run from the ISTC number to place and date of publication to publisher to language and the British Library shelf mark.Using these terms can improve the accuracy of the 1.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".