PLRE.Folger
Private Libraries in Renaissance England
Screens in Books
The Search Screens
There are two search screens for the Books database: Basic and Advanced. See the instructions in Searching Books for details on how to conduct a search. After a search is conducted, records are retrieved in the Brief Records screen.
The Brief Records Screen
In the Brief Records screen, selected biographical information accompanies the retrieved records. For a detailed description of that information, see Fields in Books. Additional biographical information about owners can be found in printed PLRE volumes.
Records appear arranged according to ascending PLRE numbers. To sort the records in another manner, click on any column heading except View. The records will then sort in ascending numerical or alphabetical order according to the information in that column. A second click on that heading will sort the material in descending order. The column heading on which the records have been sorted will remain underlined until the records are re-sorted on a different column heading.
When sorted in ascending order, records in the Date or Dt Range column that contain a date range are sorted according to the beginning date. When sorted in descending order, the records that contain a date range are sorted according to the end date. To return the records to their original order, click on the PLRE Nbr column.
Clicking on any part of a record in the Brief Record activates the PLRE Volume Entry screen, a detailed view (described more fully below).
Clicking on the column heading View causes all the items checked in the Brief Records screen to appear as a group in the PLRE Volume Entry screen. To prevent an item from appearing in that collective PLRE Volume Entry screen, click on its box to delete the check.
The PLRE Volume Entry Screen
In this screen, the material for a particular record (or for multiple records if the column heading View is clicked) is retrieved as printed in the Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies volumes.
In addition to the information found in the Brief Records, in this screen are provided STC and Wing numbers, valuations and dates of valuation of the items listed, and the current location of the specific book listed (if known). See Fields in Books for additional details.
The PLRE Volume Entry also provides additional, if still abbreviated, biographical information about the owner of the book described. Apart from the owner’s name, that information includes the owner’s death date, degrees (if any) and an Identifier (usually a profession or vocation), as well as the date of the book-list, the reason the book-list was made (e.g., probate inventory, will, account book), and where in sixteenth- or seventeenth-century England the list of books was compiled.
At the bottom of this screen, the last name of the Contributing Editor who prepared the book-list for PLRE appears; editors’ full names can be found by accessing Contributors. With APND (i.e., Appended) lists (those with PLRE numbers beginning with Ad), the book-list's published source (if applicable) is included in the first record in standard bibliographical form. An abbreviated form of this information, usually the last name of the author of the source, appears in each succeeding record of that book-list.