Conference Agenda

The music sources of the Bavarian State Library (Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, BSB) constitute a collection of worldwide significance, whose scholarly cataloguing and investigation is an ongoing process. In recent years, the materiality of these sources has increasingly moved into the focus of research. The BSB addresses this growing interest by providing a wide range of material-related information.

A particular area of focus is the documentation of watermarks and the provision of their reproductions. The diversity of historical source types through which music has been transmitted presents distinct methodological challenges: composite manuscripts and single-leaf collections, large-format choir books, and music prints - each require different approaches to the identification and recording of watermarks.

This paper offers insights into the methods used to document watermarks, introduces tools and aids for their cataloguing, and also addresses the reproduction of watermarks and their dissemination through subject-specific repositories and databases.

In a sense, watermarks are the memory of paper. They keep information about the specific mould which produced a sheet of paper. Hence, they can be used for the dating of paper and localisation of the paper mill, among others. This is known since more than two hundred years and therefore watermarks were collected, investigated, and published in a big amount of catalogues and publications. For more than 20 years, watermarks are digitized and stored in databases. In 2009, the Bernstein portal went online and allowed the access and search in four databases. Since then, the portal is continuously growing. In 2026, the portal allows the simultaneous access and search in ten languages in 56 watermark databases from 28 countries with more than 325.000 watermarks. Five of these databases are focused on watermarks and other paper issues from music manuscripts.

Englisch:

Scientific libraries regularly produce highly specific research data – including datasets on thermographic images of watermarks, apart from the individual presentation images – which should be made visible and reusable in accordance with the FAIR criteria. However, the more potential reuse targets and relies on extensive data corpora, the less convenient decentralised storage in separate repositories of the respective institutions appears from the researchers' point of view.

This paper presents the open research data community initiated by the Berlin State Library and the Saxon State Library (Dresden), which pursues a cooperative and iterative approach to creating cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary access to thermographic data. By introducing a minimal but uniform standard for metadata and data preparation, a significant number of data sets are being made available for the first time for research questions in the fields of digital humanities and computer vision.

Deutsch:

Wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken produzieren regelmäßig hochspezifische Forschungsdaten – darunter auch die Datensets zu thermographischen Aufnahmen von Wasserzeichen, abseits der einzelnen Präsentationsbilder –, die im Sinne der FAIR-Kriterien sichtbar und nachnutzbar gemacht werden sollten. Doch je mehr potenzielle Nachnutzung auf umfangreiche Datenkorpora abzielt und angewiesen ist, desto weniger komfortabel und sinnvoll erscheint aus Sicht der Forschenden die dezentrale Ablage in getrennten Repositorien der jeweiligen Einrichtungen.

In diesem Beitrag wird die von der Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin und der Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden initiierte offene Forschungsdatencommunity vorgestellt, die einen kooperativen und iterativen Ansatz verfolgt, um einen institutionen- und fachübergreifenden Zugang zu thermographischen Daten zu schaffen. Durch die Einführung eines minimalen, aber einheitlichen Standards für Metadaten und Datenaufbereitung wird erstmals eine signifikante Anzahl von Datensätzen für Forschungsfragen in den Bereichen Digital Humanties und Computer Vision zur Verfügung gestellt.