This conference is co-organised with the Short Title Catalogue Vlaanderen (STCV), who are celebrating their 25th anniversary with a programme of events.
The Conference will take place at the KBR Brussels on 26-27 June 2025. We invite scholars and library professionals to join us in Brussels to discuss current and future (re)use of RNB data. If you wish to attend, we invite you to send your registration to secretariat@cerl.org.
The aim is to address how these data are used in different contexts. Topics of interest include:
26 June 2025
12:30 Registration
13:00 Opening – STCV and CERL
13.30–15:00 Moderator – Peter Sjökvist, Uppsala University Library
15:00 Tea break
15.30 Short presentations
16:00-18:00 Moderator – Heleen Wyffels, Flanders Heritage Libraries (Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheken)
27 June 2025
9.30-11:00 Moderator Marieke van Delft, bookhistorian, curator emeritus KB, Nationale Bibliotheek of the Netherlands
11:00 Coffee break
11.30-12:00 Short presentations
12:00–13:00 Moderator – Marian Lefferts, CERL
13:00-13.15 Conclusion
Afternoon: Guided tour of the KBR Museum by Ann Kelders, Curator of the KBR Museum
Biography:
Prof. Dr. Pierre Delsaerdt is professor at the History department of the University of Antwerp and part-time professor at KU Leuven. He teaches book and library history, the history of the Low Countries and cultural history of the early modern times. His research focuses on the history of the printed book and of (private and institutional) libraries. For a list of his publications: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/pierre-delsaerdt/publications/
Abstract:
Never before in the ancien régime was so much political pamphlet literature published in the Southern Low Countries as in the years 1787–1794, when this region gradually broke away from the Austro-Habsburg empire. One of the zealous publicists in this period was the Brussels-based A.J.D. De Braeckenier. He was active as a journalist but soon also emerged as a printer of ephemeral political tracts. This paper examines the extent to which the Short Title Catalogue Flanders can support research into the life and work of this forgotten figure.
Biography:
Nina Lamal is a researcher at NL-Lab and Huygens Institute. Her research focuses on diplomacy and politics, the transnational history of media, communication and publishing in the early modern Low Countries, Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire. She is the author of Italian Communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries (Leiden 2023) and editor of the digital edition of the letters of Christofforo Suriano, the first Venetian envoy to the Dutch Republic from 1616 to 1623. Other recent publications include ‘Cross-Border Printing Privileges in the Seventeenth-Century Low Countries’, Early Modern Low Countries 8:2 (2024), 276-296. https://doi.org/10.51750/emlc20863.
Abstract:
By requesting a printing privilege, a printer could temporarily obtain legal protection from a competitor. By granting a privilege, an institution or ruler gave a seal of approval to a certain work, author, or publisher. Increasingly, privileges became part of the efforts of church and state to exert control over the content of a printed text. While scholar recognize the importance of these privileges to trace the circulation of knowledge and power dynamics, researchers trying to study the use of privileges more systematically face significant problems. Very few original privileges have survived in archives and printers who often included summaries of privileges into their books but have so far escaped the attention of retrospective bibliographies. In my paper, I will highlight the potential of the inclusion of this type of material into STCV.
Biography:
Marian Lefferts is the CERL Executive Manager. She has two MAs (English language and literature and Medieval Studies) from the University of Groningen, and worked on the International Medieval Bibliography in Leeds and the Illustrated Incunabula Short-Title Catalogue for publisher in Reading, before she joined CERL in 1998.
Abstract:
In this short presentation Marian Lefferts will report on the Working Group's exploration of Data Sheets to describe online Retrospective National Bibliographies, and she will draw you attention to the CERL Thesaurus as a potentially useful tool researchers and librarians.
Biography:
Karen Limper-Herz is Head of Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and the Honorary Secretary and the Senior Vice-President of the Bibliographical Society. She is a trustee of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, a member of the organizing committee of the Arbeitskreis für die Erfassung, Erschließung und Erhaltung historischer Bucheinbände (AEB) in Berlin, and a member of the Wolfenbüttel Working Group for the History of Libraries, Books and Media.
Abstract:
This paper will provide a brief update on the English Short Title Catalogue which has recently moved to CERL, opening up new opportunities for development and research.
Biographies:
María del Pilar Martínez Olmo is Director of the Tomás Navarro Tomás Library of the Higher Council for Scientific Research. Doctor in Hispanic Philology from UNED and Graduate from the Autonomous University of Madrid. Her professional career began in 1987 as a Spanish lecturer at the University of St. Andrews and in 1989 she joined the CSIC's Specialized Library and Documentation Graduates by competitive examination, where she has held different positions: Andalusian Libraries Computerization Program (1989-1993), director of the library of the Rocasolano Institute of Physical Chemistry (1993), director of the Library of the Philology Institute (1994-2006) and since the end of 2006 she has held the position of director of the Tomás Navarro Tomás Library (CCHS-CSIC)
Juan Gomis is professor at the University of Valencia, his research focuses on popular print culture in Early Modern Europe. He has studied one of the most spread popular genres in Spain, the so-called “Literatura de Cordel”, from multiple perspectives: cultural representations (religious, political, gender), material aspects of the printings (the “pliegos sueltos”), production and dissemination, and usages and readers. He has also made significant contributions in order to understand this phenomenon from a transnational, European perspective.
Abstract:
Mapping Pliegos is an interdisciplinary project of researchers and librarians that brings together in a free and open access digital portal the Spanish chapbooks (“pliegos de cordel”) from the Early Modern times to the present day and which are digitized in the institutions that guard them.
The project is born from the collaboration between the CSIC, the British Library, the Cambridge University Library and the Catholic University of Valencia with a common objective, to provide unique access to Spanish and Ibero-American “pliegos de cordel” that are kept in any institution and are digitized and accessible on the Internet, and to promote the study of these prints. It offers an enriched database with various search possibilities and access to digital reproduction in all records. Furthermore, its different sections offer an introduction to “literatura de cordel”, a description of the technical procedure followed to create the catalog and several links to other similar projects for the dissemination and study of European printed popular culture.
In 2025, the Mapping Pliegos portal brings together the description of more than 20,000 chapbooks and has incorporated new sets from the National Library, the University of Geneva, the Joaquín Díaz collection and several university libraries through Rebiun to the foundational collections. The collections of “pliegos” from the Spanish Royal Academy and other international institutions with which contact has already been established will soon be incorporated.
The immediate future of Mapping Pliegos is to expand the chronology of the chapbooks gathered in the project and delve into the studies of the images that illustrate these documents to establish relationships, identify engravers and printers and expand the study possibilities based on the image with the support of the digital reproduction that all the “pliegos” have.
Link: http://biblioteca.cchs.csic.es/MappingPliegos/
Biography:
Vojtěch Šícha (Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences) graduated from Charles University in Prague with a master’s degree in Book History in 2019. Since 2011, he has worked as a bibliographer and book historian at the Department of Historical Bibliography of the Library of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Currently, he is the head of the department. He is responsible for the Bibliography of Foreign Language Printed Bohemica up to 1800 (BCBT). Between 2016–2020, he was a member of the research team of the project Knihověda.cz - The Portal of the History of Czech Book Culture up to 1800. Between 2021-2023, he led the project Czech Book Illustration in the Early Modern Period (e-ilustrace.cz). His primary areas of study include Czech printed book culture in the Early Modern Era and Czech national retrospective bibliography.
Abstract:
The aim of the presentation is to summarize the results of activities on the Czech national retrospective bibliography in the last two years and to present our efforts to participate in infrastructures and projects at national (LINDAT-CLARIAH.CZ, InterCOST) and international level (COST PCPSce) in order to facilitate the sharing of bibliographic data. Finally, the Database of Early Modern Czech Book Illustration (e-illustration) will be briefly introduced as an example of reuse of bibliographic data for research purposes in the field of older book culture.
Biography:
Alyssa Steiner is a Curator for Printed Heritage Collections at the British Library, where they focus on the incunabula and 16th books. They are an Incunabula Short Title Catalogue editor and have worked on a January 2025 data release, which enables researchers to use ISTC data in new and innovative ways.
Abstract:
The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue is celebrating its 45th anniversary this year. The union catalogue currently records more than 30,000 editions printed with moveable type in the 15th century and gives holding information for institutions worldwide. This paper will consider how this data may be made available beyond its current use within the database. What are the challenges associated with working with data that has been compiled over more than four decades? And what are we able to do with this data using digital humanities tools and methodologies? Finally, we explore current projects to create and ingest bibliographical data from printed sources.
Biography:
Thomas Wallnig is a historian of early modern Central Europe with a broad portfolio in digital humanities. FWF START project “Monastic Enlightenment”, granted in 2007, allowed him to build up a still-existing research group which investigates the intellectual culture of religious orders during the early modern period. He pursued and broadened that research, especially its digital component, during his tenure as co-chair of COST Action IS1310 “Reassembling the Republic of Letters”, and still he proactively promotes collaborative scholarly work in his role as chair of the “Austrian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies”. – Wallnig has worked with the history of early modern science and scholarship, of erudite letter writing as well as with the history of historiography. He directed a project shedding light for the first time on late-humanist Orientalism in Central Europe, and is now overseeing the digital agenda of COST Action CA23137 “Print Culture and Public Spheres in Central Europe”.
Abstract:
Dr Wallnig presents some recent student work (created with reused bibliographical data in their DH Master's program), some methodological considerations (which analytical models from communication and media studies can be reused in data-driven book research?), and some future plans from the context of the running COST Action (a hackathon in Vienna planned for December in which they want to play with different types of bibliographical data).
Biography:
Malcolm Walsby is Professor of book history at Enssib in Lyon, director of the Gabriel Naudé research centre, and co-founder of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of a number of monographs and articles on early modern European history. Most recently, he has published Booksellers and Printers in Provincial France 1470-1600 (2021), and his next book Entre l'atelier et le lecteur. Le commerce du livre imprimé dans la France de la Renaissance is due out in September. He has also edited volumes of essays and bibliographies on European book history. A specialist of the archaeology of the book and the economics of the book trade, he is currently developing an international research project on the creation and use of Sammelbände in Europe.
Abstract:
Biography:
Nikolaus Weichselbaumer is a Junior Professor at the Gutenberg Institute for World Literature and Written Media at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Department of Book Studies. He studied Book Studies and German Philology at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, where he later worked as a research associate. In 2014, he earned his PhD with a dissertation on the typographic work of Hermann Zapf. His research focuses on the history of book design, the technical and economic history of the book, and digital methods in book history. He leads several Digital Humanities projects, particularly in the field of pattern recognition applied to historical print culture — including OCR for early prints, automatic typeface recognition, and the transformation of historical bibliographies into structured research data. He is also one of the editors of the Gutenberg-Jahrbuch.
Abstract:
The national bibliographies VD 16, VD 17, and VD 18 are indispensable resources for early modern studies and have supported a broad range of scholarship for decades. However, their current architecture poses significant challenges for quantitative and data-driven research. The separation into three systems, inconsistencies in metadata standards, and limited machine accessibility constrain their use as integrated research data. In this talk, I outline key desiderata for making the VD data more interoperable, reusable, and accessible for computational analysis. I propose concrete approaches to overcoming structural and technical obstacles and reflect on how the VD could be transformed into a more research-friendly infrastructure—without compromising the bibliographic rigor that has made them so valuable.