Compiling “contemporary” bibliography has been one of the primary CLB tasks ever since the early 1960s. The Contemporary Bibliography team emerged at the CLB in its modern guise during the early 1990s, when ongoing processing of current specialist output was first undertaken in structured database form. This is the longest existing CLB team with the highest number of members, which processes current printed output in three hundred periodicals and approximately two thousand book publications every year on an ongoing basis.
The team’s chief output is the Czech Literary Bibliography database, which the team not only edits but to which it adds new entries and newly ascertained facts (particularly author attributions).
The team’s scope is very broad. Its members process not only specialist periodicals (literary studies, Slavic studies, history, museum, library and the like) but also diaries, journalistic, regional and student magazines, collections and annual anthologies. Moreover, selected team members specialize in processing book publications and associated paratexts (personal profiles, introductions, annotations and commentaries) from specialist output, fiction publications, dictionaries, encyclopedias, exhibition catalogues, artistic monographs and the like. More than three quarters of the excerpted periodicals are available at the Institute of Czech Literature library (catalogue here), while other titles are excerpted externally at other libraries (the National Library and the National Museum Library) or from online versions.
Team members are engaged not only in excerption activities but also in the compilation of specialized bibliographies, as well as publishing studies on the methodology and practice of bibliographical work. The CLB also publishes Bibliographica specialized book series, and the excerptors present and popularize CLB activities at relevant specialist events and conferences. They regularly organize lecture summaries for database users, particularly students in higher education.
Team leader: dr Anna Gnot
Contact address: clb@ucl.cas.cz
