|
Judaica
Reference and Bibliography Awards, 2005
The Research and Special Libraries Division (R & S) of the Association
of Jewish Libraries (AJL) is very pleased to announce the winners of
the 2004 Judaica Reference and Bibliography Awards.
These awards, sponsored respectively by Dr. Greta Silver of New York
City and Eric Chaim Kline of Los Angeles were presented at the banquet
at the 40th Annual Convention of the Association, which took place on
Tuesday evening, June 21st at the Oakland Marriott City Center.
On behalf of the members of AJL, we congratulate the winners on their
valuable contribution to the field of Judaica reference and bibliography
and thank the donors, Eric Kline and Greta Silver, for their generous
support.
Winners of this year's awards were:
Reference Award
Rosalind Reisner. Jewish American Literature: A Guide to Reading
Interests (Westport, Conn.: Libraries Unlimited, 2004).
This practical guide for adult readers on contemporary works on the
Jewish experience contains over 700 annotated titles and several hundred
other references for further reading. As such, this book aids collection
development and reader advisory services ranging from public, synagogue,
community center, and school libraries to academic and research institutions.
While the author concentrates on books for US audiences published from
1980-2002, there are also a fair number of works dating from the 1950s
that are included because they are still widely read.
All titles included are award winners or have been favorably evaluated
in major review sources employed by librarians. In addition to the chapters
on collection development and readers' advisory resources, there are
seven chapters on major genres that include literary and historical
fiction, biography, Holocaust literature, mysteries and thrillers, and
science fiction and fantasy. The author/title and subject indexes ease
the users'' task of locating specific works by a wide range of topics,
titles, and writers.
Rosalind Reisner is the librarian at Monmouth Reform Temple Library
in Tinton Falls, New Jersey; program coordinator at Central Jersey Regional
Library Cooperative in Freehold, New Jersey; and has worked in public,
academic, school, and special libraries for over thirty years. She is
also a member of the Judaica Librarianship editorial board.
Bibliography Award
Marvin J. Heller. The Sixteenth Century Hebrew Book: An Abridged
Thesaurus (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004), 2 volumes.
This scholarly two-volume bibliography provides descriptions of 455
selected Hebrew-character titles published in the sixteenth century
listed in chronological order of publication. The detailed introduction
on Hebrew printing focuses on the developments of the century in question.
Each title that is included contains one or more images of a page from
the book described, with a header that lists the Romanized and Hebrew
title (or Latin title), author, year of publication, provenance, and
publisher. The main body of the text provides a description of the contents,
the physical characteristics of the book, and discussion of the author.
The subjects covered range from biblical and talmudic texts and commentaries
to Jewish religious law (halakhah) and from mystical texts (Kabbalah)
to works of literature.
Following the main section on the texts, the second volume contains
extensive lists, indexes, sources, and a bibliography. In compiling
these indexes and lists, the author has considered every possible access
point. These include a chronological inventory of the titles in the
set, an alphabetical list of places of publication followed by titles
published in each town or city, a list of romanized (and Latin) titles
followed by the Hebrew listing of titles, a list of the authors, and
a detailed general index of the material covered by key words.
Marvin J. Heller is an author who specializes in Hebrew bibliography
and printing. He also won the 1999 AJL R & S Bibliography Award
for Printing theTalmud: A History of the Individual Treatises Printed
from 1700 to 1750 (Brill, 1999).
Members of the R&S Judaica Reference and Bibliography Awards Committee:
Elliot H. Gertel, (The University of Michigan), Cheryl Jaffee (Library
and Archives Canada), Peggy K. Pearlstein (Library of Congress), Abraham
Rosenberg (Ets Haim-Livraria Montezinos, Portuguese Israelite Seminary
Ets Haim, Amsterdam), James P. Rosenbloom (Brandeis University).
Elliot H. Gertel
Chair, R & S Judaica Reference and Bibliography Awards Committee
|