With most of Google’s partner libraries, it is impossible to know what books are in the process of being digitized. However, the KB catalogue offers a glimpse of books currently tagged for digitization. In order to inform its patrons that a book has been pulled from the shelf, the librarians at KB have added a note: “This book is temporarily unavailable due to digitization.” (“Dit boek is tijdelijk niet beschikbaar vanwege digitalisering.”) A search for this phrase turns up books in the catalogue that either have been recently digitized or will be digitized in the coming months. As of today, there are in the queue over 38,000 titles from the eighteenth century (1700-1799) and 13,000 titles from the nineteenth century (1800-1899).

For users of the Junius Institute’s Post-Reformation Digital Library, this means that in the coming months the collection of available eighteenth-century Dutch theological works is set to rapidly expand. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of theological works from Dutch Reformed authors will become available in a relatively short period of time. Among these are numerous works by pastors associated with the so-called Nadere Reformatie or “Further Reformation,” including multiple editions of Aegidius Francken’s Kern der Christelyke Leere, which served as a textbook at Calvin Theological Seminary in the nineteenth century. Below is a sampling of links to Reformed theologians with titles set aside to be digitized in the KB catalogue. Taken together, this short list alone represents over 500 digitized titles on the horizon.

Leiden Professors:

• Johannes Marckius (1656-1731) [16 works]
• Herman Witsius (1636-1708) [11 works]
• Salomon Van Til (1643-1713) [9 works]
• Johannes Wesselius (1671-1745) [14 works]
• Taco Hajo van den Honert (1666-1740) [13 works]
• Albert Schultens (1686-1750) [25 works]
• Johan van den Honert (1693-1758) [61 works]
• Bernhard De Moor (1709-1780) [15 works]
• Ewald Hollebeek (1719-1796) [15 works]

Utrecht Professors:

• Melchior Leydekker (1642-1721) [9 works]
• Herman Witsius (1636-1708) [11 works]
• Hermann Alexander Röell (1653-1718) [2 works]
• Hieronymus Simons van Alphen (1665-1742) [12 works]
• Friedrich Adolph Lampe (1683-1729) [18 works]
• Albertus Voget (1695-1771) [7 works]
• Willem van Irhoven (1698-1760) [7 works]

Franeker Professors:

• Campegius Vitringa, Sr (1659-1722) [13 works]
• Ruard Andala (1665-1727) [3 works]
• Herman Venema (1697-1787) [18 works]

Groningen Professors:

• Paulus Hulsius (1653-1712) [4 works]
• Antonius Driessen (1684-1748) [18 works]
• Cornelius van Velzen (1696-1752) [15 works]
• Daniel Gerdes (1698-1765) [10 works]

Nadere Reformatie Pastors:

• Jodocus van Lodenstein (1620-1677) [14 works]
• Franciscus Ridderus (1620-1683) [8 works]
• Willem Sluiter (1627-1673) [41 works]
• Jacobus Koelman (1631-1695) [18 works]
• Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635-1711) [18 works]
• Abraham Hellenbroek (1658-1731) [16 works]
• Jacobus Fruytier (1659-1731) [15 works]
• Bernardus Smytegelt (1665-1739) [16 works]
• Johan Verschuir (1680-1737) [5 works]
• Aegidius Francken (1699-1743) [15 works]
• Wilhelmus Schortinghuis (1700-1750) [7 works]
• Theodorus van der Groe (1705-1784) [13 works]
• Alexander Comrie (1706-1774) [13 works]

In fact, we frequently digitize materials for scholars in Europe, particularly music scores. We do have a limit per month per requestor, and how long it takes is dependent on what other projects are being worked on, vacations, etc.
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It can take anywhere from a week to 4 or more weeks.
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The University has plans to digitize the majority of the materials in its collections. This is why we can agree to not charge for the service, we are going to digitize it anyway, its just a question of when it gets in the queue. A patron request moves an volume up to the front of the line.

I have heard similar anecdotes elsewhere. So when in doubt, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Google Books, by the by, seems to still have a mechanism for suggesting corrections or rescans for the numerous problems that appear in their books. The older method was convenient, but seems to have been phased out in the new interface. Now, if you try to click on “Help” when viewing a book page (available under the “gear” dropdown menu on the top right when navigating in a book), there is a link under “Help” for “Known Issues – Books,” under which there is another set of menus under “Book quality issues.” If you click on that, you can click on “Book has missing pages, typos, or other kinds of error,” which recommends reporting the error(s) via a form. The form doesn’t seem to work, however.

You can get to this page from other places on Google Books, but it seems to be intended for authors and copyright holders. Also, I recommend using the report error features on Google Books judiciously. Google has been known to pull the entire book out of digital circulation while addressing the reported error. So make sure you’ve gotten whatever copy you need to use in the meantime if it is a source that you want to have access to while any bad scan issues are being addressed.

As I worked on editing the text for further publication, I needed to consult the original to clear up a few editorial queries. But I did not have a copy of the treatise by Mariana easily at hand to do some comparison. So naturally I went over to the Post-Reformation Digital Library to see if the original was listed among the site’s contents.

I was not disappointed. There were in fact multiple copies of the collection of treatises which included De monetae. Mariana’s treatise, De monetae mutatione, was the fourth of seven treatises published together in 1609 in Cologne. Via the PRDL I quickly downloaded a version.

But as I opened the document I found that the pages of the fourth treatise seemed to be missing from the PDF. The page number in the PDF would just suddenly skip ahead when I moved past the end of the third treatise. When I looked at the title page, I found that the contents listing for De Monetae mutatione was crossed out, and there was in fact a signature affixed to the document noting that the treatise had been expurgated!

Mariana’s tract, which attacks King Philip II’s debasement of the currency, led the monarch to haul the aged (seventy-three-year-old) scholar-priest into prison, charging him with the high crime of treason against the king. He was convicted of the crime, but the pope refused to punish him. He was released from prison after four months on the condition that he would remove the offensive passages in the work, and would promise to be more careful in the future.

King Philip, however, was not satisfied with the pope’s punishment. So the king ordered his officials to buy up every copy they could find and to destroy them. After Mariana’s death, the Spanish Inquisition expurgated the remaining copies, deleting many sentences and smearing entire pages with ink. All non-expurgated copies were put on the Spanish Index, and these in turn were expurgated during the course of the seventeenth century. As a result of Philip’s censorship, the existence of the Latin text remained unknown for 250 years, and was rediscovered only because the Spanish edition, which Mariana himself had translated into Spanish, was incorporated into a nineteenth-century collection of classical Spanish essays.

This censorship would have lasting implications for my efforts to secure a copy of the text, as De monetae had been expurgated in not only the first but also the second version of Tractatus VII that I consulted on Google Books. In the second instance, I found the table of contents intact, and moved ahead to download the file.

But again there was a missing range of pages right where De monetae ought to be! When I examined the front matter again, I found that a note explaining the expurgation was on the bottom and the verso side of the table of contents.

As anyone who has used Google Books for research purposes knows, there are some interesting quirks in the system. The PRDL had only turned up those two copies of Tractatus VII, both originating from the Complutense University of Madrid. But if you visit the “about” page for a Google Book, you can often find similar, related, or other versions of the work that are difficult to locate by other search methods. And in the case of my search for De monetae mutatione, the third time turned out to be the charm.

Google also has a copy digitized from the Austrian National Library that had been untouched by the Spanish expurgation efforts, and with a few more clicks I had my digital copy of De monetae mutatione safely downloaded and ready for consultation. The un-mutilated version of Tractatus VII including De monetae mutatione is now listed on the PRDL page for Mariana. Thankfully for my own research efforts, King Philip’s expurgatory efforts did not reach into the holdings of Austria.

In a future post I’ll explore some of the implications of this adventure for digital scholarship. But if you have your own story of the sometimes labyrinthine nature of digital source exploration, please share it below.