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Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place is a collaborative project operated by Columbia University. The database aims to document and make accessible the circulation of printed Jewish books published between 1450 and 1800. These books include those in Hebrew and other Jewish languages as well as works in Latin and non-Jewish languages about Jewish subjects.
For your research, you can use Footprints to obtain specific information about the movement and whereabouts of these books. Each Footprint in the database is the reconstruction of a moment when a specific book copy can be associated with a particular person or location. This information is gathered from various sources such as handwritten notes in books, auction catalogues and correspondences. The database is free to use.
Footprints enables you to trace a book’s trajectory through time and understand how it was used and valued across different locations. It is a valuable tool for exploring the history and cultural influence of Jewish literature, particularly in the early modern period.
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The Looted Cultural Assets provenance database is a cooperative project launched in 2016 by various German libraries and now managed by the Free University of Berlin. The main objective of Looted Cultural Assets is to advance the search for cultural goods looted by the Nazis by collecting and making research data searchable. The Looted Cultural Assets cooperation hopes to facilitate the return of the stolen books to their rightful owners today.
You can use this database in your research to find information about previous owners. In particular, this database allows you to search all previously documented provenance features such as rubber stamps, bookplates (ex libris) and handwritten notes. The database is based on the results of investigations by the contributing partners and contains more than 32,000 provenances and information on over 10,000 individuals and institutions.
The Looted Cultural Assets database is freely accessible online and offers provenance researchers and other interested parties the opportunity to make their research results publicly available in a database. This makes it one of the most comprehensive databases of its kind.
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ProvenienzWiki, operated by the Head Office of the GBV Common Library Network and co-founded by the Berlin State Library, is a specialised database focused on provenance research. This platform is available exclusively in German. It enables interested institutions to describe provenance features, upload images and document information about previous owners, the history of their book collections and individual collections.
You can use ProvenienzWiki for your research to obtain detailed information about the origin and history of specific books and collections. This is particularly valuable if you are interested in the history of books and their movement through different hands and places. ProvenienzWiki offers you the opportunity to trace the tracks of books and understand how they have been used by different people and in different collections.
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Provenance clues in books, such as rubber stamps, bookplates, handwritten ownership signatures and dedications, are crucial for tracing the history of a book, especially those looted during the Nazi era. Not all of these provenance clues are easy to read because many of the handwritten entries are written in old German handwriting styles. Deciphering them is essential to identify the previous owners of a book. To understand what is written, it can be helpful to familiarise yourself with old German handwriting styles. Consider enrolling in introductory courses provided by local libraries, archives, adult education centres or universities. To start out, it is helpful to look at a chart of all the letters and how they were written, which you can look at alongside the text you are trying to decipher. The Wikipedia article on German Kurrent cursive handwriting includes as chart of this kind as well as additional interesting information.