 | Outline of the Project |
| Progress of the Project |
| History of the Watermark Collection |
| Online Presentation |
| Conference in November 2004 |
| Contact / Enquiries |
| Zurück zur deutschen Projektseite |
he systematisation and classification have been carried out according to the publication of Piccard's volumes. The file cards of the main classes "Crown" and "Bull's head" (Volumes I and II, 1-3) have been rearranged and finally classified. With these two groups about half of the remaining approx. 75.000 watermarks were being prepared for digitisation and incorporation in a text and image database.
The reorganisation mainly followed the existing classification scheme. The scheme has been improved and completed in order to meet the demands of the digital presentation. The groups "Crown" and "Bull's head" were the two main and most problematical groups of watermarks. The problem that arose here was that the volumes only depicted abstracted watermarks and not the single records Piccard had collected. These abstract groups of watermarks had to be revised by using the original single records of the card file. The respective records were newly classified and re-organised.
The further systematisation of the watermarks was continued in the order of the printed books. They were all re-organised and newly classified. During the work at volume 16 "Mountains, hills (three)", the group was subdivided in three newly created main groups according to the amount of hills depicted. Now there are "Mountains, hills (three)", "Mountains, hills (five)" and "Mountains, hills (six)".
The works on re-classification were completed by 15th July 2004.
he following fields have been added to the database:
he input of the texts in the newly structured database has been started after the first groups of watermarks were re-classified and re-structured. By March 2005 all data registered on the card files had been entered in the database.
y June 2004 the first part of the collection (about one third of the watermarks) had been digitised. The remaining cards were digitised after the input of the texts on the card files was finished. Additionally we scanned the introductions of the Piccard volumes, edited them with an OCR program and finally printed them to a file in PDF format.
ne of the aims of the project is the measurement of all watermarks of the "Piccard" collection. The search within larger groups of similar watermarks will become much easier, if you enter the data of the size of the relevant watermark.
Initially, about a thousand watermarks have been measured at the Commission of paleography and codicology of medieval manuscripts ("Kommission für Schrift- und Buchwesen des Mittelalters") in Vienna. The measuring tool used has been developed for the project Watermarks of the Middle Ages ("Wasserzeichen des Mittelalters" - WZMA). However, some groups of watermarks (e.g. "Bells") had to be rearraged as they were inverted. Many images had to be repositioned using a picture processing programme. When reinverting the images it is important to ensure that the texts written on the original card files are not being turned as well, but will remain in the same position.
Three parameters were taken from all watermarks: height, width and distance of the chain lines. Some motifs contain additional features (like watermarks that have a pole on top) that need to be also measured. From these more complicatedly structured watermarks three more parameteres were measured. There has been integrated a tool "Abmessungen suchen" (search measures) in the online database. The user can chose the degree of deviation from the requested measurement that will be tolerated during the search. He can also decide whether subgroups are included in the search or not.
elow you will find publications on the current and former projects. More available literature about Piccard and watermarks is given in the introductory section of the online finding aid.
|
