Bibliographical data
- Catalogues
- Digitising Early Printed Books and Manuscripts
- Full text
- Incunabula - Bibliography
- Incunabula - Price Index
- Needham's Ruler - instructions for use
- E. White Researching Print Runs
- Judaica
- Manuscripts - Online resources
- Microforms
- Printers' Devices
- Emblems
- Provenance Information
- Standards for storing and exchanging bibliographic records
- Tools for transcribing manuscript and archival materials
- Various
- Watermarks and papermaking
- White gloves debate
Fun overview of History of Printing by Chris Landry, Managing Director at Colourfast, an international printing company
Catalogues
- Bibliopoly is a multilingual database of valuable and antiquarian books for sale from leading dealers on four continents.
- CICLE(Corpus of Classic Latin Incunabula in Spain) is a relational database which is focused on the heritage of incunable editions of Latin classics produced in printing presses located in Spain from the 1470s till 1500, including printings in Latin and in translation. The database identifies the collection of editions and the surviving copies in Spain as well as elsewhere.
- CICLPor(Corpus of Classic Latin Incunabula preserved in Portuguese libraries) is a database which comprises the Portuguese heritage of copies of incunabula of Latin authors from the Archaic period until Late Antiquity, ending at the time of Isidore of Seville (ca. 560-636). Incunabula included in CICLPor were printed outside of Portugal since in this period no Latin classic texts were produced by printing presses located in the country. Editions in Latin as well as translations are included.
- ESTC (English Short-Title Catalogue – books printed up to 1800)
- Heritage of the Printed Book Database (HPB / formerly the Hand Press Book Database)
- Karlsruhe Virtual Catalogue (over 500 million books and serials in library and book trade catalogs worldwide)
- Library Hub discover, giving you access details of materials held in many UK national, academic and specialist libraries.
Booksellers' catalogues
- Dr. Jörn Günther Rare Books in Basel has a website that provides various kinds of information for researchers, art historians, historians and everyone who has an interest in precious and rare books. Their more recent catalogues are available online, and the website also offers detailed information about manuscripts, single leaves and incunables, as well as selected images of artworks.
Full Text
The Deutsches Textarchiv aims establish a cross section corpus of important works in the German language printed between ca. 1600 and 1900, it covers different genres such as fiction, science, technology, medicine, philosophy and law. The Deutsches Textarchiv presents almost exclusively the first editions of the respective works. The project offers digital facsimiles and full-text encoded in XML TEI P5 format. The text files can be downloaded in XML or HTML format. Linguistic search routines are available: serialization of tokens, lemma, phonetic search (with rewrite rules for historic spelling). Currently, 352 texts dating from between 1780 and 1900 are online (November 2010).
- Text-Inc has the objective of assembling the corpus of texts printed in the fifteenth century (see 15cBOOKTRADE project)
Microforms
European Register of Microform and Digital Masters (EROMM) - free access to CERL members
Back to the top of the page
Judaica
The database Mapping Jewish Libraries allows you to locate Jewish libraries and collections of Jewish materials across Europe.
Printers’ Devices
CERL has undertaken a programme of digitisation of repertories of printers’ and publishers’ devices, to create links to the individual images from the appropriate entries in the ‘‘Imprint Names’’ section of the CERL Thesaurus. To date the CERL Thesaurus contains links to
- English printers' devices up to 1640 from R.B. McKerrow, Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices
- Italian 16th-century printers’ devices held in the EDIT16 database
- 15th and 16th-cnntury Parisian printers' devices from P. Renouard, Les marques typographiques parisiennes des 15e et 16e siècles (Paris, 1926)
- Spanish printers' devices up to 1850 from F. Vindel. Escudas y marcas de impressores y libreros en Espana durante los siglos XV a XIX (1485-1850).
- Printers' devices brought together at the University Library of Barcelona: covering the 16th to the 18th century, geographically from all around Europe but mostly from Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Germany and Low Countries, reflecting the collection’s own personality. The records in the CERL Thesaurus are http://thesaurus.cerl.org/record/cni00045319 to http://thesaurus.cerl.org/record/cni00047557.
Other on-line repertories of printers devices
- MAR.T.E. - Marche Tipografiche Editoriali: Italian 17th-century printers’ and publishers’ devices - (English version)
- Ronald B. McKerrow. Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices in England & Scotland 1485-1640
Emblems
Emblematica Online draws from the most important collections of emblematica worldwide. It is hosted by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and its founding partner is the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. Contributing partners include Glasgow University Library and Utrecht University, which contributed both book- and emblem-level data. Additional contributors include the Getty Research Institute Library and Duke University Library.
Provenance Information
See separate Provenance Information section.
Back to the top of the page
Standards for storing and exchanging bibliographic records
Digitising Early Printed Books and Manuscripts
IFLA Guidelines for Planning the Digitization of Rare Book and Manuscript Collections
- link to website, and link to free PDF
White gloves debate
- Reading Room policy, Stanford University Libraries
- Reading Room policy, National Archives, the Netherlands
- Reading Room policy, Royal Library, Sweden
- Reading Room policy, Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
- Reading Room policy, Getty Institute
- Post by Kimberly Kwan in Ransom Center Managezine (July 2018)
- Misperceptions about white gloves, a Paper by Dr. Cathleen A. Baker, Conservation Consultant and Independent Scholar and Randy Silverman, Preservation Librarian, University of Utah
- Blog post by Danielle Westerhof, independent historian
- Blog post by Hannah Clare, Conservator at The National Archives, UK
- Blog post by Rebecca Romney, the Rare Book Expert on Pawn Stars and former manager at Bauman Rare Books
Watermarks
- Wasserzeichenkartei Piccard: Digital Publication of the Piccard Collection of Watermarks - The complete “Piccard” watermark collection - including the printed as well as the unpublished items - is available on-line. About 92,000 records are accessible to a wider public. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) and is based in the Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart.
The web site has introductions in English and German. There is a full-text search interface in English, French and German, and a thematic browse interface also in English, French and German.
- Watermarks in Incunabula printed in the Low Countries (WILC). The WILC web site gives a description of the project which was intended to provide additional dating evidence for the large number of undated incunables printed in the Netherlands. There is a brief introduction to the creation of watermarks during the paper-making process and a page showing methods of recording watermarks.
The search interface provides a simple search, and advanced search and a thematic browse index.
- Bernstein was an eContentPlus project which started in September 2006 (funding for a total of 30 months). It was a co-operation between nine institutions from Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands. The objective of project Bernstein was to create an integrated European digital environment for the expertise and history of paper. The project interlinks all existing European databases of paper reproductions, makes their content accessible to specialized image processing tools for the measurement of paper features, and provides an interface to the digital resources of domains related to paper studies or by which the knowledge about papers can be enriched and contextualized. Additionally, a strong dissemination plan included ready to deploy paper expertise software packages to ensure the sustainability of growth and interest in paper studies beyond the project’s lifetime. Link to the Bernstein Project
- Watermarks in English incunabula. The Bibliographical Society has awarded a grant for a project led by Dr Lotte Hellinga which will scan images of watermarks from English Incunables prepared for the English volume of the British Library's catalogue of incunabula BMC. The project will develop a database which will be compatible with the WILC and Bernstein projects.
- Watermarks in Spanish incunabula. The Bibliographical Society has also awarded a grant to Dr Gerard van Thienen to prepare a database of images of watermarks from Spanish incunables which will also be developed in a format compatible with WILC and Bernstein.
- The International Association of Paper Historians (IPH) also maintains a web page of IPH related databases which include watermark information.
- Nicolas Oikonomides, 'Writing Materials, Documents, and Books', in: Angeliki E. Laiou (ed.), The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through the Fifteenth Century(Washington D.C., Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), pp 589-592. On 11th-century papermakers in Greece.