History
Previous efforts to comprehensively catalog 15th century printing include Georg Wolfgang Panzer's Annales Typographici ab Artis Inventae Origine ad Annum MD (1793–97) and Ludwig Hain's Repertorium Bibliographicum (1822). Hain's work was later supplemented by Copinger's Supplement and Reichling's Appendices, which would pave the way for the Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (1925). The Gesamtkatalog der Wiegendrucke (GW) was the most comprehensive catalog of incunables to date (and still offers more in-depth information than ISTC), but in recent decades work on the catalog has slowed to such a degree that the goal of cataloging all extant incunables under the GW's system is indefinitely far-off.
The ISTC was created to establish a system of incunable cataloging that was simple enough to be expanded quickly, bringing the goal of a complete incunable catalog back into focus. Furthermore, the ISTC would use standardized entries that could be entered into a machine-searchable database.
Work on the ISTC began in 1980 under the leadership of the British Library's Lotte Hellinga. Frederick R. Goff's Incunabula in American Libraries (1973) was the first pre-existing catalog to be keyed into ISTC's database. Besides providing the catalog's first 12,900 entries, Goff's system for classifying information about incunables formed the basis for the structure of ISTC's records. Entries for all of the incunables in British Library and the Italian union catalog (IGI) were added next, followed by other national incunable catalogs.
Read more about this topic: Incunabula Short Title Catalogue
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