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Provenance Information
- Information about Can-you-help? database and CERL Provenance Digital Archive
Interest in provenance information goes in and out of fashion. Once it was a bibliophilic interest concerned with authors’ association copies and books belonging to great men. Following the rise of the history of the book in the 1980s and 1990s, provenance studies have become an important ingredient in the work of social and cultural historians dealing with questions of readership and literacy. The ownership of books by craftsmen and women is now as significant as that of kings and archbishops. At the same time, a separate development of concern about the security of library collections has widened interest in recording provenances of all sorts, ancient and modern.
CERL has seen its own interest in provenance grow over the years, reflecting the increase in interest on the part of its members and the wider scholarly public. Increasing numbers of records in the Heritage of the Printed Book Database now record provenance information. And CERL has added a Provenance Names section to the CERL Thesaurus.
These pages aim to give you access to a variety of resources that record provenance information. CERL is responsible for a number of resources that you can search below. CERL also maintains a webpage which lists online resources for provenance information, hosted by institutions around the globe, here. It is likely that the materials on this page will reflect the interests of members of the Consortium, especially in the context of work on CERL’s Heritage of the Printed Book Database (HPB) and the CERL Thesaurus; that is to say that it will be largely European in focus and will deal especially with the period up to the mid-nineteenth century.
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CERL Provenance Digital Archive
The Can-You-Help? database that CERL offered to help to identify a book plate, a binding stamp, a library label or stamp, or to read and identify an owner's inscription, has been suspended. A new service, created in the context of the CERL Provenance Digital Archive (hosted by Arkyves), has been created.
This database provides a user environment for recording provenance evidence for both identified and unidentified former owners. After you have logged in with your Google, Facebook or ORCID account, you can post provenance evidences (including images) and post replies to other people's uploads (including requests for assistance in identifying former owners).
Queries posted on the Can-You-Help? database until 2009 are available For further information, go to here. CERL plans to migrate queries posted on the Can-You-Help? database between December 2009 - August 2018 to the CERL Provenance Digital Archive.