Grants received

The Secretary of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), Cristina Dondi, of the University of Oxford, has been awarded a European Research Council Consolidator Grant for her project: “The 15th-century Book Trade: An Evidence-based Assessment and Visualization of the Distribution, Sale, and Reception of Books in the Renaissance”. The Grant, of the duration of five years, will enable a significant expansion and enhancement of the database Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI), the enhancement of the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC), the study of the day-book of a 15th-century Venetian bookseller recording the sale of 25,000 printed books with their prices (with Prof. Neil Harris), cataloguing the incunabula collection of St Petersburg National Library book in hand, the creation of a new database to research the corpus of texts printed in the 15th century (modelled on the Bodleian's Bod-inc), experimenting with the application of image-matching software to 15th-century illustration, and of scientific visualization techniques to MEI data, that is applied to the distribution and use of books. For further information about the project see: http://www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/research/15cBooktrade/.

The European Research Council (ERC) is a European funding initiative, designed to support the best scientists, engineers and scholars in Europe. Its mandate is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe, selected by peer review evaluation, through competitive funding and to support investigator-initiated frontier research across all fields of research, on the basis of scientific excellence.

• In 2017 the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe awarded the 15cBOOKTRADE a grant to catalogue Hebrew incunabula from Italian, Israeli, and British libraries in MEI.
• In 2017 The Helen Hamlyn Trust awarded to the 15cBOOKTRADE a grant to complete the cataloguing of incunabula in Venice, Fondazione Cini and Correr Museum.
• The cataloguing of incunabula from libraries of Regione Lombardia (which oversees a network of some 120 libraries) started in 2010 by Alessandro Ledda and Giancarlo Petrella, part of the team headed by Prof. Edoardo Barbieri of Centro di Ricerca Europeo Libro Editoria Biblioteca (= CRELEB), Università Cattolica of Milan. Grants were received from Regione Lombardia and from Fondazione Cariplo.
• A Government Research Funding grant (PRIN) was awarded in 2009 to scholars of Università Cattolica and Università Statale of Milan to catalogue book-in-hand in MEI some 2,500 books.