Library's Nordic scholarly series Islandica goes online

Cornell University Library has put its extensive scholarly series of Icelandic and Norse studies online. Islandica, first published in 1908, is available online to the international scholarly community in a searchable, open-access format and in print.

The series is an extension of the library's Fiske Icelandic Collection, the largest in North America and among the three most comprehensive in the world. Daniel Willard Fiske, Cornell's first university librarian, bequeathed his Icelandic collection to the library upon his death in 1904; the collection now includes more than 40,000 volumes on medieval and modern Iceland and the Norse world.

The library publishes the Islandica series of Icelandic and Norse scholarship, which welcomes scholarly submissions and is distributed by Cornell University Press.

For the first three decades of Islandica, a new volume appeared nearly every year. Most were authored or edited by Halldór Hermannsson, first curator of the Fiske Icelandic Collection. As Old Norse-Icelandic literary criticism evolved, the series adapted, producing deep scholarly studies, exhaustive literary bibliographies and authoritative translations.

"Islandica is returning to a venerable model, one in which academic librarians engage directly in scholarly publishing," said Patrick J. Stevens, managing editor of the series and curator of the Fiske collection in the library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Stevens views the model as a natural extension of Hermannsson's work in the early part of the 20th century, adding that "electronic open access offers scholars an effective and attractive medium for dissemination of research, no less in the esoteric humanities than in the hard sciences."

Volume 53 of Islandica, "Speak Useful Words or Say Nothing: Old Norse Studies" by Joseph Harris (and edited by Susan E. Deskis and Thomas D. Hill) is now available. The forthcoming Volume 54 is "Romance and Love in Late Medieval and Early Modern Iceland: Essays in Honor of Marianne Kalinke," edited by Kirsten Wolf and Johanna Denzin.

Gwen Glazer is a staff writer for Library Communications.

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