Cathedral Libraries Catalogue

INTRODUCTION

Production of the Catalogue

It might be of interest to give a brief, non-technical account of the way this volume of the Catalogue has been produced. The data are stored on the University of Kent's ICL 2960 computer. A set of programs was prepared to handle a simple database in which each record consisted of five fields: reference number, heading, date, notes (optional), and locations. The first program guides the keyboarder when typing in the data from the catalogue slips which have been checked and marked up and also produces printout for initial proofing. An interactive editor for the database allows corrections, changes and additions to be made as required. For example, this editor has made it a simple matter to add new locations to existing entries in the database as we have received them from collaborators. The order of preparation of material is of no consequence to the computer as it can sort the database into numerical order of STC or Wing number whenever necessary. This has enabled us to proceed with straightforward material and to leave queries and difficult items until later: we did not at first enter any of the material requiring greek type, preferring to handle these entries in a single block and merge them into their correct place.

The next stage of proof-reading was done using a small laser printer made available in the Computing Laboratory at Canterbury which produced roman, italic and bold type in several sizes and also some of the additional special characters needed. A program was written which combined the material from the database with commands to make the laser printer take appropriate actions (change fount, change point size, flush to a new line, indent, print an accented character, print a superior character, etc.) This output enabled us to make a final check for literals and for typographical presentation.

The final form of the Catalogue was produced on a Monotype Lasercomp photo-typesetter at the University of Oxford Computing Centre. Once again, a program was prepared to read the database and generate a mixture of data and typesetting commands to drive the Lasercomp. This time, the program had to produce the correct column widths and depths, three columns to the page, with running titles, without breaking entries over the column ends. The film-set output was then dispatched to the printer.

On the whole this seems to have worked successfully. If the reader notices any small imperfections due to this method of automated production, he should blame the Editor-in-Chief, not the computer, but he should also consider the considerable savings of cost which have been achieved over more conventional methods and the unlikelihood of the Catalogue appearing in any other form at all.

Most of the programs were written by the Editor-in-Chief in the programming language BCPL running under the EMAS operating system on the University Computer. Specialised software to drive the photo-typesetters was made available by colleagues in the Electronic Publishing Research Unit at Canterbury and by the Lasercomp Service at the Oxford University Computing Centre.