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The Bernstein Project
VII Bernstein
The importance of watermarks for the identification and
dating of paper has been known for more than two hundred
years and is now accepted without hesitation.
This kind of dating is accomplished by comparing undated
watermarks with those that are dated. Since it is comparatively
simple, many individual researchers have collected
dated watermarks and printed them in catalogues. Thus, in
the two hundred-year history of collecting watermarks, an
appreciable number of catalogues of varying provenance
and quality have been published. For the most part, the
time period that has been focussed on is the Middle Ages.
For traditional medieval sources in paper form, palaeographic
or art historical methods often fail to determine
accurately the period they were written or to categorize
them. In such cases, a comparison of watermarks allows
more accurate dating. The most important collectors
and collections are presented in Chapter V, ‘Watermark
Imaging Technologies, Watermark Collectors and their
Collections’.
The catalogues generally contain true to scale tracings of
the outlines of the watermarks, and also include other information
such as date, place of use, etc. Many of the catalogues
are arranged according to motifs. Searching for a
particular watermark in a catalogue is often very laborious,
because some motifs occur in countless variations. If the
search ends with a negative result, one can never be sure
whether a watermark has not been overlooked. Another
disadvantage is that most of these catalogues contain only
drawings, which by their very nature are subjective and often
not exact.
New perspectives for watermark research opened due to
two developments. In the 1950s, the Russian scientist Dmitry
P. Erastov showed for the first time that good images of
watermarks and mould structure can be made using beta
radiography. The method has the additional advantage that
any writing masking a watermark and making it difficult to
recognize disappears to a large extent in such images (see
Erastov 1958). Using radiography methods, it became possible
for the first time to create not only exact copies of watermarks
but also make images of the structure of the paper
mould (chain lines and laid lines). The results of the radiographic
procedures are grey-scale images similar to
medical X-rays as we all know them. A second push came
through the development of computer technologies, especially
those of databases and the internet. It was obvious
that with the growing volume of data on watermarks, watermark
databases should be created to hold them, and
that the processing speed of computers could be used to
search for and compare them. Such databases have now
been established, in which the watermark images (e.g. rubbings,
beta or electron radiographies) are scanned, saved,
and stored. If necessary the images can be improved for
viewing (for example, by contrast enhancement), and then
enlarged with measurements. It is possible to ascertain the
width and height of the watermarks, their position and
spacing between the chain lines, as well as the number of
laid lines per predetermined width. The data can be further
enriched with additional metadata.
The next step has been to make the available online databases
accessible on the internet to ensure the widest possible
use of the data. The largest online databases at present
are Piccard-Online, WILC and WZMA, which are presented
in Chapter VI.
Databases are more powerful and more useful the more
data they contain. A centrally managed and accessible data
pool containing all the data from the separate databases
can be generated by using an interconnected network. The
aim of the Bernstein Project has been the creation of such a
portal, which initially links the four watermark databases
Piccard-Online, WILC, NIKI, and WZMA.
Bernstein is supported by the European Union, fifty percent
of its financing coming from the eContentplus program.
eContentplus is a five-year EU program that has
aimed at making data distributed online more easily accessible
for users. In 2005 the Bernstein Project was granted
funding for a period of thirty months. The project was
launched in September 2006 and is scheduled to end in
February 2009.
The name Bernstein is not an acronym, but a metaphor
referring to amber, fossilized resin, which contains (as does
paper!) information from the moment of its creation. For
amber this might be insects, while in paper it is the traces
of the tools (the mould and its watermark figures) and the
raw material used in its production.
As already mentioned, a common means of accessing
databases is via a portal, which means a unified webpage
must be created. The Bernstein portal (www.memoryofpaper.eu)
is an integrated workspace that allows access to watermark
data, associated reference data (bibliographies, incunabula
catalogues), as well as to advanced analysis and
expertise modules (e.g. statistics, GIS, image processing
programs, surveying tools).
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