A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1991 (Debrecen, 1993)

Művelődéstörténet, irodalomtörténet - Fekete Csaba: The Librarianship of Peter Jánki (1737)

Csaba Fekete THE LIBRARIANSHIP OF PÉTER JANKI (1737) Peter Jánki (1698?- 1699?— 1783) was the last among those student of the Reformed College, Debrecen who acted as a librarian without the supervision of a professor or director. He was thirty of age when began his higher studies, and forty, when studied in the Netherlands. Because of historical circumstances and poverty most of the Hungarian students were elderly when, after having spent yers as teachers and collected mone, visited unversities abroad. As librarian, Jánki reorganized the order of books, and created a new alphabeticel catalogue of the sutdents' library. Earlier his work was taken as directed by professor Maróthi, however such opinions were not based on research, as how he undertook cataloguing at all. Here a detailed analysis and selected examples reveal his adopted method. As librarianship was inherited yearly form the XVI century by one of the excellent students, actualy a merge of customes learned form predecessors and own skill, invention, and care replecad trained practice. In college book indexes of the age most prints were represented by a few characteristics, if not a single word e.g. Ovidius, and so required bibliographical details are defficient. In Debrecen, Jánki was the first among students, who applied a fuller description of books, namely included author, title, data of edition, and in addition a remark (i.e. integrity or defectivity of the copy, parchment, leather or missing binding). It is due to lack of instructions, regulations and reference manuals, that some of the informations are missing, others distorted. Not knowing the language, he simply listed English books under Liber Anglicus as a collective title. Or, he used mixed categories of title, short title, common name of standard referenc works, subject, collevtive heading, etc. Apocryphs and pseudonyms are not identified, hidden or forgotten details of works bound together in colligate volumes, a dispersion of successive editions of the same work under separate headings, — all create a considerable frustration to research. After his time (since 1744), first bibliothecae praefectus, later a director, traditonaly the professor of the Hungarian Language, was appointed by College authorities to supervise the library and librarianship. Janki himself spent the rest of his life as a pastor in village congregations int the environs of Debrecen. His method of cataloguing is worth analysing as such studies are missing in special literature concerning the reformed college life and librarianship of the past. His example illustrates how far a talented and eager student was able to master librarianship all on his own. 331