Recently Paper Trails Iceland went to a conference in Cork, Ireland. Watermark specialists gathered from 16th to 18th October for the 5th international conference on watermarks in digital collections. In this blog post I would like to use the opportunity to present some of the exciting projects we heard about in Cork.
Louise O‘Connor from the National Library of Ireland in Dublin and our host Pádraig Ó Macháin from the University College Cork explained how paper was a much needed commodity for administration in Dublin in the 16th and 17th centuries. Paper was often imported from France via Bristol and other English ports. However, paper sellers also made use of direct trade routes between France and Ireland, and French paper is found in and around Irish coastal towns and trade centres.
In Germany, Veronika Giglberger and Bernhard Lutz from the Bavarian State Library in Munich use watermarks for analysing music manuscripts. For their analyses they use a sophisticated setup with a thermographic camera in combination with a book cradle, which was exciting to see not least from a technological point of view.
Ivan Badanyak from the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb works on the publication of the enormous watermark collection of Mošin and Traljić, which will be part of the Bernstein portal. As there are thousands of watermark drawings in this collection, this publication will be a considerable gain for the scholarly community.
Ilaria Pastrolin from the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris presented us the prototype of a watermark ID app. The preliminary results are very promising, and I am eagerly waiting for further developments.
There were also presentations of watermark analysis in Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Russia, Poland and even Mexico, which proves that the watermark community is truly international. A big thank you to the organisers, Pádraig Ó Macháin, Maria Stieglecker and Emanuel Wenger for such a great and inspiring conference, and the Royal Irish Academy, the Marsh's Library and the Chester Beatty Library for inviting us for a visit!
You can find the conference programme and some of the presentations, as well as photographs taken at the conference here: https://bernstein.oeaw.ac.at/twiki/bin/view/Main/Conference_Cork20191016.html
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