Success Stories

Incunabula, Hebraica & Judaica

Rare Religious Books Incunabula, Hebraica & Judaica Now on the Internet

In 1977, Montrealer Jacob M. Lowy, industrialist, philanthropist and bibliophile, gave the National Library of Canada one of the three foremost private collections of rare Hebraica and Judaica, and one of the outstanding collections of Hebrew Incunables (early books) in the western hemisphere. The holdings of the Lowy Collection span more than five centuries and include some forty volumes of Hebrew and Latin Incunables and more than one hundred early and rare editions of the Bible in many languages. The collection contains nearly one quarter of all Hebrew books printed during the 16th century. Recently, a catalogue written by Brad Sabin Hill for the 1981 National Library exhibition Incunabula, Hebraica & Judaica was digitized by a team of Ottawa high school students and launched on the Internet.

The project was carried out under contract to Industry Canada’s SchoolNet Digital Collections program, which gives people 15 to 30 years of age entrepreneurial and technology-based job experience converting collections of Canadian material into digital form for display on SchoolNet. The SchoolNet Digital Collections web site has grown to become possibly the largest single source of Canadian content on the Information Highway.

Cheryl Jaffee, project leader and curator of the Jacob M. Lowy Collection, said the importance of this effort cannot be underestimated. "This is the first electronic copy of the Lowy Collection catalogue. Researchers can now readily access more than 200 pages of this remarkable work on one of the most important holdings on Hebraica and Judaica and Incunables in the world".

The response to the SchoolNet Digital Collections web site has been very positive. Listed as one of the best sites on the Jewish Web, it was also the subject of a glowing review in the October edition of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.

The project team consisted of three students from Yitzhak Rabin High School in Ottawa. Team leader Bram Bregman, along with Moshe Minywab and Jonah Rabinovitch, took a total of eight weeks to scan the catalogue, and put it on the Internet. Bregman said he enjoyed every aspect of his summer job. At the outset, he and his partners registered a business to carry out the project. Although he had previous experience designing a web site as part of a school project, he said it turned out to be pretty basic when faced with the exacting standards of the National Library of Canada.

"We definitely learned a lot about Internet technology," he said. "I already knew a little about HTML, but this project taught me better ways to use the code". Bregman is modest about his achievements. He has already started another small company in the desk top publishing business, and regularly turns out brochures and flyers for his father’s pizza store and for school fund raising events. "The most significant part for me was having a real job, in an office, and experiencing what it’s like to go to work every day".

He said that as a religious Jew he felt fortunate to be able to work on the Lowy Collection. "There was little room for error on this project. It really had to be as perfect as we could make it. We took two weeks just to revise and edit our work."