For the watermark inclined paper enthusiast there are several powerful portals, databases and applications that are, or hopefully will become, indispensable to our research. Let us ring the new year with a presentation of three of them.
One of the most exhaustive watermark repertories is Die Wasserzeichenkartei im Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, often called "Findbücher", by Gerhard Piccard, who presented images of nearly five thousand watermark types with c. fourty-five thousand individual watermarks in seventeen volumes (Stuttgart, 1961-1997). The watermarks are sorted after motifs, and each volume starts with a geographical localisation of the watermark types, as well as a list of datings of the individual watermarks.
Second to none of online power tools is the online portal Bernstein: The Memory of Paper. The portal gives access to more than a quarter of a million entries of watermarks, among them the images of Carles-Moïse Briquet's four-volume Les Filigranes (1907). Approximately half of Bernstein's entries originate from WZIS, the Wasserzeichen-Informationssystem, a database that includes Piccard's watermark images. Bernstein also offers a watermark toolkit that allows the users to flip, mirror, invert, measure etc. watermark images. Most importantly, it also lets us compare the images to other images. Finding the same or similar watermarks is thus made much easier.
The third power tool is still in development, but a very promising prototype is already available: Filigranes pour tous for computers and mobile phones. If you scan a watermark image, the app identifies it by comparing it to already uploaded images.
Paper Trails is now adding watermark images from Icelandic charters and manuscripts to the Wasserzeichen-Informationssystem, so please check the database regularly and stay tuned for the next blog, which will focus on the watermark in Iceland's oldest extant paper!
Links
Comments