Book History: Home

The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue is the international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide.

MEI is a database specifically designed to record and search the material evidence (or copy specific, post-production evidence and provenance information) of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc. MEI is linked to the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), provided by the British Library, from which it derives the bibliographical records, and it allows the user at last to combine searches of bibliographical records (extracted from ISTC) with copy specific records.

Owners of Incunabula is a satellite database of Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI) which gathers biographical information on former and present owners, both personal and institutional (and including binders, illuminators, booksellers, etc.).

Corpus Christi College and the Stanford University Libraries welcome you to Parker Library on the Web, a digital exhibit designed to support use and study of the manuscripts in the historic Parker Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The Parker Library is a treasure trove of rare medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, as well as early printed books. Almost all manuscripts in the Parker Library collection have been fully digitised and are available in this exhibit, along with associated bibliographic references and annotations made by scholars from around the world.

We help you find digitized medieval manuscripts. We have collected 500+ links to fully digitized books, fragments, IIIF repositories, etc.

Research tools – Categories: general, A-Z, cataloguing, chronology, codicology, music, palaeography, provenance, reference, texts. Educational and other resources – Categories: blogs, educational, exhibitions, projects, subjects (including websites dedicated to individual manuscripts and persons).

MDR is a curated database of peer-reviewed digital materials for the study of the Middle Ages. Users can browse an alphabetical list or search using controlled-vocabulary subject tags to find vetted online resources of many types, including: imagebanks; bibliographies and reference works; pedagogical tools; editions and translations; music and other multimedia collections; interpretative websites; and new works of digital scholarship.

The Labyrinth provides free, organized access to resources in medieval studies. The Labyrinth’s easy-to-use links provide connections to databases, services, texts, and images around the world. Each user will be able to find an Ariadne’s thread through the maze of information on the Web.
Digital Scriptorium--
https://digital-scriptorium.org/
Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image--
https://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/sceti/moved-sceti-collections

The Atlas of Early Printing http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu
Graphion’s Online Type Museum http://www.typographia.org/1999/graphion-collection.html
MASTER: Manuscript Access through Standards for Electronic Records http://master.dmu.ac.uk/index.html

NINES is a searchable and tagged site linking the material, cultural and literary archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first. The NINES site is a source for peer-reviewed digital work in the long 19th-century (1770-1920), British and American; a source for digital humanities research materials; a software tool repository for new forms of research and critical analysis.
Rare Book and Special Collections Division--
https://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/
The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe--
http://fbtee.uws.edu.au/main/

Printing, Publishing, Letter Writing, and Early Telecommunication; Technology, Commerce, and Culture; Architecture; Literature.

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 480,000 items published between 1473 and 1800, mainly, but not exclusively, in English, published mainly in the British Isles and North America, from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.

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, both of which contributed book-level information.

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.

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 the MEI database records provenances specifically for incunabula. CERL has added a Provenance Names section to the CERL Thesaurus and has created the Provenance Digital Archive.