History

At the sixth CIPL meeting in Paris in 1946, the first meeting following World War II, it was decided to compile a linguistic bibliography which would cover the previous years in order to re-establish international contacts between linguists which had been interrupted by the war. Linguists from ten different countries contributed to the first volume, which was was the responsibility of Prof. Christine Mohrmann, who soon entrusted the work to Jan Beylsmit. In 1948, the newly founded UNESCO agreed to make a financial contribution to each volume, which would cover the printing costs. In 1949, the first volume of the Linguistic Bibliography/Bibliographie Linguistique (LB) was published by publishing house Spectrum (Utrecht, The Netherlands).
 
From then on, new volumes of the LB yearbook were published, first with Spectrum, then with Martinus Nijhoff (1980-), Kluwer (1988-), Springer (2005-), and finally Brill (2008-). From 1983, the LB staff were housed in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands), where an online bibliographical database was developed. The Linguistic Bibliography Online (LBO) was launched in 2002 and contains all bibliographical references from 1993 onwards.
 
Today, the Linguistic Bibliography print volumes and online database are published with Brill (Leiden, The Netherlands), and are compiled by four in-house editors and some 45 contributors from all over the world. The print volumes continue to appear annually, and the Linguistic Bibliography Online currently contains over 375,000 bibliographical references and is updated monthly.

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