Documentations

It is of great importance for research to continuously document this research, in particular the provenance characteristics, as well as the restitutions. This not only serves to evaluate the holdings within the SLUB, but also supports external research to the same extent. Because: Provenance characteristics are cultural-historical "knowledge anchors".

The documentation of researched provenances and provenance characteristics, which have been recorded in the SLUB's research projects since 2009, is carried out on several levels and databases:

GND records have been assigned for persons and corporate bodies: GND stands for "Gemeinsame Normdatei" (common standards file) - a service for using and managing authority records in a network with others. Individuals, corporate bodies, etc. are assigned a unique and unchangeable ID and can therefore be linked to each other as well as to external data records and web resources, such as Wikipedia. The SLUB links the GND records with the provenance features in the Deutsche Fotothek.

We also report finds of suspicious or undoubtedly Nazi-looted books to the LostArt database.

When researching and evaluating the SLUB's historical holdings, it is also important to consider wartime losses. This does not only apply to those that can be traced back to the heavy bombardment of Dresden on 13 February 1945. During the Second World War, a large part of the holdings were taken to salvage locations and survived the war largely unscathed. However, after the war, the Soviet trophy commissions removed around 258,000 volumes from the storage locations. The majority of these war losses have already been documented and can be easily and quickly identified by means of ownership stamps and the catalogue of war losses, for example by antiquarian booksellers.

Several thousand provenance features from the SLUB collection are already documented in the Deutsche Fotothek: Bookplates, seals and stamps as well as handwritten entries such as autographs, dedications and personal notes not only provide important information about the provenance of a work. They also provide revealing insights into cultural history by allowing conclusions to be drawn about acquaintances and networks, historical events or even readers' opinions. In the SLUBlog we tell you about some impressive examples (in German).

For provenance research, pictorial materials with ownership marks from libraries or similar institutions as well as private collectors are indispensable. Even today, copies that were unlawfully transferred to foreign ownership during the Nazi dictatorship or in the post-war period can still be found in antiquarian bookshops or at auctions. In 2010, as part of a provenance project, a documentation with ownership characteristics of today's SLUB and its predecessor institutions, the Sächsische Landesbibliothek Dresden and the library of the Technische Hochschule and later the Technische Universität, was created as illustrative material.

Your contact persons:
Jana Kocourek, Head of the Manuscripts, Old Prints and Regional Studies Department
Project staff: Elisabeth Geldmacher, Nadine Kulbe, Gabriela Brudzyńska-Němec, Olivia Kaiser
E-mail:raubgut@slub-dresden.de