Mark Lombardis works represent relations among people and institutions that the artist collected by extensive research. His personal library contains a variety of books, journals and other publications that are of interest as the knowledge base behind the drawings. In fact, we can understand his work as a kind of knowledge processing and visualization.

The list of titles was published in the Mark Lombardi: Preparatory Drawings 1994–2000. The list was compiled by Robert Hobbs. It was published on the Web before, see http://web.archive.org/web/20090722102820/http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/lombardibibliography.html. I also found a public listing of the titles at The library of Mark Lombardi.

Starting with this HTML-pages, we manually split the entries into their bibliographic information, converted this into BibTeX format by a script. During that we “cleaned” the data, corrected and extended it slightly and classified the entries with their publication type. We then used JabRef to export the BibTex to further formats.

We make the list available here in the following processable formats:

The next step with the processable datasets is to add DOIs or URLs of the books themselves and to get access to their electronic representations. By processing the books then, we could annotate the relations in the works with their origins in publications from Lombardis library.

As a first technical step, we will interface to various services and query them for more information on the titles. For example, at the Library of Congress a search for the title “Unholy trinity : how the Vatican’s Nazi networks betrayed western intelligence to the Soviets” leads to a result page which also includes its ISBN, in this case 0312071116. A search at Amazon leads to several offers for the title. At Google books, we find a result in which references to that title from other books are mentioned. This manual search can be easily automated as a first step to have an electronic corpus of Mark Lombardis library.

For human consumption, here is a browsable table including the respective BibTeX entries. This is under construction and not fully functionally.