Arts Faculty receives generous donation: two containers of specialist publications

Faculty libraries tend to have problems with the provision of new specialist literature, primarily due to a lack of finance. Thanks to the cooperation of Emeritus Professor Ivan Hlaváček (Department of Auxiliary Historical Sciences and Archive Studies of the Faculty of Arts, Charles University) with the prestigious Brill publishing house, the Faculty received a donation in the form of 800 scientific publications from a variety of fields.

Several tens of shelf-metres of books donated

At the end of last year Frans Hakeves, a representative of Brill, asked Prof. Hlaváček if he would accept a donation of the publishers’ books. This was due to the fact that the Professor had, on a number of occasions, devoted close attention to Brill publications in the specialist press in the Czech Republic. This offer was not, however, the first; several years ago, Prof. Hlaváček had already organised a medium-sized donation by the same publishers to not only the Faculty of Arts, but also some other social-scientific institutions and establishments, primarily the Jewish Museum in Prague.

“Obviously I accepted this generally formulated offer, while expressing my gratitude. Brill immediately replied, stating that, based on my response, a package of around eight hundred books would be prepared! As I was reading this I literally gasped; the market value of Brill books meant that we were being offered goods worth somewhere in the region of several hundred thousand Czech crowns,” said Prof. Hlaváček.

Several days later, Prof. Hlaváček received a brief message stating that two containers of books would be delivered to the faculty in the name of Prof. Hlaváček. The containers duly arrived and the employees of the Scientific Information Centre of the Faculty of Arts were instructed on how to unpack and transfer the books inside, as the total volume of publications came to several tens of shelf-metres. The majority of the titles delivered were of interest to the faculty departments of Sinological Studies, Japanological Studies, Traditional Oriental Studies – chiefly Arabic and Judaic Studies, as well as Classical Philology and History, including Archaeology. The books delivered consisted not only of monographs, but also a variety of dictionaries, bibliographies, commemorative almanacs and manuals such as various ‘A Companion of...’ editions, summarising current knowledge of precisely defined topics, be they material or biographical. Needless to say, virtually all publications, with a few exceptions, were written in English.

In accordance with the information submitted to the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Arts on 24^th     January, the books are in the process of being allocated according to the interests and needs of individual departments to specialist libraries or the central Jan Palach Library. Some volumes are also being offered to non-faculty centres both within the university and in the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, as the package also contained individual volumes pertaining to the natural sciences. “Our gratitude to Brill for this rare and unexpected gift, where the true value and use of it only time will be able to tell, was expressed not only by myself, but also in the name of the Faculty of Arts by the Dean, Associated Professor Michal Stehlík,” added Prof. Hlaváček, who also praised the initiative of the aforementioned faculty Scientific Information Centre.

About Brill:

The Brill publishing house, based in Leiden in the Netherlands (and Boston, USA), which is this year celebrating the 330^th anniversary of its founding in 1683, has long been one the most significant publishing houses in the world, primarily focusing on providing a broadly conceived publishing service to the humanities, and (to a lesser extent) other areas of science. Its range of interests in the field of the humanities is not, however, limited by territory or time, nor even by genre, as the publishers’ range also includes a large number of scientific journals, bibliographies and encyclopedias, as demonstrated by the previous outline.

“Needless to say, the works published by Brill are key in practically all the aforementioned fields. These books are also, at the same time, expensive, meaning that they are significantly underrepresented in our libraries,” stated Prof. Hlaváček.