A Librarian in Renaissance Studies: How I Benefited

by Tom Izbicki (tizbicki@rci.rutgers.edu)

For many years I have been involved in the Renaissance Society of American [RSA] and in the American Cusanus Society [ACS]. The one is an interdisciplinary organization with its own website, meetings, and publications. The latter focuses on Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), a German lawyer who became a cardinal and a major speculative thinker in the Renaissance. Both attracted me because of my historical interests. I started out in graduate school with an interest in Charlemagne but migrated into the study of the Renaissance papacy, its apologists, and its cultural patronage. Where better to pursue these interests than in the context of the Renaissance?

These involvements have included representing legal and political thought on the Council of the RSA. In addition, I serve on the Executive Committee of ACS. I have brought to these involvements my training in libraries and an interest in full-text digital resources. The latter interest was inspired by a Philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins who wanted access to the Past Masters databases from InteLex. I was able to secure those resources for Hopkins; and I moved on to the Patrologia Latina Database, Early English Books on Line, and other resources. That, in turn, involved me in the Text Creation Partnership. Eventually I started advocating quietly within RSA for further attention to digital resources and websites. I particularly want to see the Iter Italicum database, with its listings of Renaissance manuscripts, made more functional.

The Cusanus Society has received particular input from me as an information professional. I talked the executive Committee into using e-mail instead of the telephone and fax machines. My role also expanded to creating the ACS web site. My bibliographic and organizing skills have been employed in tracking Cusanus scholarship, co-editing books, co-organizing conferences and translating Latin texts of Cusanus.

My contacts in these circles have fed back into my library work. I have remained a research patron of my own libraries at Wichita State, Hopkins, or now at Rutgers. Using my own library has led me to evaluate critically its services, collections, and web sites. One of my projects at Hopkins was an inventory of the university’s medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. This, in turn, became a part of my Medieval and Renaissance web page at Hopkins. Learning to do web pages also led me back to WESS, doing the Medieval and Renaissance Studies page in WESSWeb.

I have carried over my interests into Wikipedia, where Renaissance entries too often come from old encyclopedias. If you read the entry for the French theologian Jacques Almain, I created it. The entry for Pierre d’Ailly, another late-medieval theologian, is largely now mine. Other entries get corrections and bibliographic updates as time permits.

Another way in which my involvement in societies has benefited my library work has been keeping up with currents of scholarship. I have learned a lot about issues in material culture, as they relate to digitization but also as they relate to preservation, through conference sessions, journal articles, monographs, and personal contacts. Frequently, the contacts are more informative than the more formal presentations and publications.

So, I see my involvements as interactive. What is learned in one area is carried over to the other. Of course, there is a cost in time spent on a variety of endeavors. One of my academic friends says that my festschrift will be entitled I Can’t Say No. I can think of worse ways in which to live life, such as limiting myself to too small a focus and being bored.

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