CERL Thesaurus

The CERL Thesaurus File is a unique facility developed to address the particularly European issue that place name and personal names in Europe varied from country to country in the period of hand press printing (1450 - c. 1830). As such, it is an essential research tool for scholars and researchers of the period.

The CERL Thesaurus file contains forms of imprint places, imprint names, personal names and corporate names as found in material printed before the middle of the nineteenth century - including variant spellings, forms in Latin and other languages, and fictitious names.

Authority files contributed by CERL member libraries and other libraries/projects concentrating on the history of the book are brought together and made searchable in one single system. The CERL Thesaurus merges standard and authority forms of names that are used in present day library catalogues without imposing CERL’s own authoritative form of name. Instead, standard and variant forms are listed alphabetically with a clear indication of the institutions that use a particular standard form.

• Previous searches can be re-examined by using the Search History.
• The linking of place names and printers, which has been introduced in the CERL Thesaurus, gives valuable new insights into book production in Europe in the hand press era.
• Users can limit their searches to include only those records for which provenance information is available. The CERL Thesaurus records do not contain provenance information, but links to information held at CERL members’ libraries, instead – currently the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek in Göttingen, the Herzogin-Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek in Weimar, the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon.
• The CERL Thesaurus contains links to digitised printers’ devices. To date links to McKerrow’s Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices, printers’ devices held in the EDIT16 database, and links to P. Renouard’s Les marques typographiques parisiennes des 15e et 16e siècles (Paris, 1926), have been included. Further reference works will be added.
• Character encoding in Unicode (UTF-8) makes it possible to store and display all the characters and scripts from the extensive scope of the Unicode character set and the Virtual Keyboard makes it easy to enter search terms in non-Latin scripts.
• Users can discuss and amend the content of the CERL Thesaurus by adding annotations to individual records. Subsequent users can leave additional sugestions, and those who left the annotation can edit their own comments at a later date, if they wish.