Databases

The library of the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, as one of 16 Consortium members, participates in the construction of the Digital Repository of Scientific Institutes. The project financed from the Operational Program Innovative Economy, Priority Axis 2 was implemented in the period from January 2011 to June 2014. Currently it is continued with own funds. The main assumption of the project is the creation of a public, supra-regional and multidisciplinary Digital Repository consisting of digitized archival materials, scientific publications, research documentation and literary cultural heritage selected from the collections of 16 Polish scientific institutes and their libraries forming the Consortium of the Digital Repository of Scientific Institutes. The basic tasks set out by the Project are primarily the consolidation and modernization of the scientific-research and IT infrastructure of the scientific units forming the Consortium, securing the current scientific achievements of the Institutes that make up the Consortium, as well as facilitating access to publications previously reserved only for narrow, specialized groups of researchers. By facilitating the access to contemporary and historical materials collected by the Consortium Institutes, the promotion of Polish science, history and culture in the world will be improved, education and awareness in the field of searching for scientific literature in digital form will be strengthened, and the electronic resources of the global Internet will also increase with Polish content of scientific publications published by Consortium members, which in turn will affect the dissemination of the results of their research, as well as an increase in citation.

The bibliography of Polish philosophy (1896-1918) is another part of a larger publishing project implemented for years at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Until now, bibliographies of the Enlightenment (T. 1), Romanticism (T. 2) and Positivism (T. 3) have been published. Work is underway on the fourth volume, regarding the period of Young Poland. The first two issues of this volume were published (W. 1994 and 2002). The online database is a continuation of previous parts of the Bibliography. The method of developing bibliographic entries has not changed in relation to book editions. There, in the Preface of individual volumes, there are detailed explanations regarding the layout and assumptions made when editing the material. Here, we briefly remind basic information. The database contains personal bibliographies of Poles publishing in 1896-1918, as well as foreign authors and former writers present in Polish philosophical literature of that period. Polish authors, whose main works appeared before 1918, have full bibliographies: – subject literature, registering all editions of their work (first editions, re-editions, major fragments, work reviews, own reviews, translations); – subject literature: all studies and reviews from the author’s beginning to the latest. Authors debuting at this time have: – subject literature, containing only works published before 1918, without reviews or studies. A full bibliography of these authors will be compiled in the next volume of Bibliography (covering the next period of Polish philosophy); As in previous volumes, authors with an incomplete bibliography are marked with the symbol “*” Foreign authors and writers active in Poland before 1750 (former authors) have: – list of own works and studies published about them in 1896-1918. Personal bibliographies are edited on the basis of an autopsy of all the author’s works. This makes it possible to separate writers from all scientific achievements, especially those dealing with philosophy aside, texts or significant fragments thereof, strictly philosophical. We don’t always manage to get to the text. We mark these works with the symbol “¦”.

The Polish Philosophical Index was created in 2012-2014. Notes all philosophical texts, as well as those from the borderline of philosophy and other disciplines that have appeared in books and magazines published in Poland since 1945. The bibliographic record – and partly the way the material is organized – is modeled on The Philosopher’s Index (therefore the titles articles from magazines should be written in simple font without quotation marks, and those from collective volumes in quotation marks; titles of books and magazines are given in italics). In the author’s index, keywords separated by # have been added to the bibliographic information about the article or philosophical book. If the text was provided with a Polish-language abstract, it is copied, and if it was divided into titled chapters / paragraphs, the table of contents goes to the Index. The list of keywords determines the placement of information about the text in the thematic index. The editors of The Philosopher’s Index classify the texts listed in the “Author Index with Abstracts” on average under five thematic entries in the “Subject Index”. These proportions have been kept in PIF: information about the article goes up to four thematic entries, information about the book up to eight (these numbers are exceeded only in exceptional cases), while reviews, small and popular texts, etc. can be noted under one entry, maximum under two. The texts in the thematic index, unlike those in the author’s, are ordered from the latest ones, within a year they are listed in alphabetical order according to the authors’ surnames. The link associated with the name indicates that the author’s index includes an abstract or table of contents. In the review index, texts are listed according to the names of the reviewed authors. Mention of a foreign book review goes under one, at most two, entries in the thematic index; there are no Polish book reviews (with few exceptions). The specificity of the Polish publishing market has decided to add a translation index – which has so far (30 January 2015) a provisional character. Texts whose authors are considered classics of a given discipline are not recorded in the thematic index (editors believe that a professional will find their way into the text of a classic anyway), while translated articles or books of less known authors go under one, or at most two, thematic entries, and they are written in a smaller font.