New Watermark Digitization Project at the Bavarian State Library

Bernhard Lutz

Wednesday, May 2, 2018

Indexing and digitization of watermarks in the music manuscripts of the Bavarian State Library up to the end of the 17th century

The Bavarian State Library holds an internationally important collection of music manuscripts from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. These include the large-format choirbooks from the Munich court chapel of the 16th century as well as monastic manuscripts and music manuscripts from the private libraries of humanists, patricians and merchants.

In recent years, two large-scale cataloguing and digitization projects have made the manuscripts with polyphonic music accessible to researchers and the public. The manuscripts documented in the printed Kataloge Bayerischer Musiksammlungen (volumes 5,1 and 5,2) were included. A new project focusing on digitizing and cataloguing the watermarks will now allow codicological details to be added to the descriptions. With funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG), all watermarks will be recorded over a period of two years beginning in May 2018 using thermographic images and will be made available free of charge through the online services of the Bavarian State Library and indexed in established subject databases such as the RISM online catalog and the Watermark Information System (WZIS).

Image courtesy of Bernhard Lutz.

Category: Library collections