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The Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg was one of the partners in the Bernstein project (www.bernstein.oeaw.ac.at) which started in September 2006 and has been completed in February 2009.
Nine institutions from Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria were taking part in the project.
It was the aim of the project to create an integrated European digital scenario of watermarks that is supposed to attribute to investigation on the history of paper. The project was designed to link all of the presently existing European watermark databases in order to offer an extensive and profound source of information as to paper investigation.
Within this framework, the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg contributes the largest amount of data by means of the watermark database Piccard-Online. Thus, the Bernstein project can be considered the European continuation of the Piccard project (www.piccard-online.de, there are also information on the project available in English). It was sponsored by the DFG (German Research Foundation) and carried out the digital publication of the Piccard watermark card file.
The databases have been enriched through specialised image processing tools considering measurement, classification and dating of paper, as well as through plenty of contextual data with bibliographical and geographical contents. Moreover, it has been a basic aim of the project to give access to the results produced to a public as broad as possible in the shape of an easily installable software package (dissemination kit).
A more detailed description of the project is offered on the project's homepage. The Bernstein portal itself can be found on www.memoryofpaper.eu.
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