The aim of the project is to create a valid methodology for the processing of book provenances that will rely on the international standards used, which have been determined by the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), and the results of important foreign provenance research projects (Municipal Library in Lyon, The British Library, Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, Bibliothèque de l'Institute in Paris etc.). The database of ownership book provenances and its outputs which emerge within the project will be a national contribution to the European processing of book provenances. The primary basis of the material to be processed will be the historical collections and libraries of famous and important figures in the collections of the National Museum Library. The results of the provenance processing will be utilised in further research within book culture and other fields of the humanities and will be presented to the public in the form of an online database, summarising publications, an exhibition and an educational programme.
In addition to the owners’ biographic data, the ‘PROVENIO’ database will contain brief characteristics of the book collection, the type of the ownership mark and ex libris along with their digitised examples and will form a resource base for a further multidisciplinary application of this information. If the provenance information is listed already during the basic cataloguing of the individual collections and their parts, the database will serve both as a union catalogue of these specific holdings data and as their source (the authority database from which data may be drawn). With the collections whose data have been recorded using other methods than the electronic cataloguing in the electronic library system Verbis, the summary data on the owners will be entered in the ‘PROVENIO’ database directly or in batches. The information in the database will hence be complemented or corrected both directly and indirectly (from below), through the actual cataloguing practice.
