The Czech Academy of Sciences presents itself in this blog post. CERL is very happy they have recently joined as a Special Member.

By Konrad K. Szymański (Ossolineum National Library, Wrocław)  This summer, thanks to the support of the CERL Internship and Placement Grant, I had the opportunity to undertake a one-month project focused on cataloguing, physical analysis, and provenance documentation of early printed books of the Seminario Barbarigo in Montefiascone (Italy). My internship combined both in situ fieldwork and remote data synthesis. The on-site component in Montefiascone provided direct physical access to the collection for material examination and photographic documentation, while the subsequent remote phase allowed for the thorough integration of these findings into CERL’s international bibliographical resources, including MEI and ISTC.

The University of Latvia Library recently joined CERL as a Special Member. In this blog post, Klāvs Zariņš and Aija Taimiņa present wonderful items from their rich special collections.

I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Studies recently joined CERL as a Special Member. Caroline Duroselle-Melish takes us on a tour of its rich collections.

Students from the Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts explored the creation of a knowledge graph for CERL

Dr. Jolanta Budriūnienė and Dr. Viktorija Vaitkevičiūtė of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania introduce their beautiful library in Vilnius and demonstrate the close connection between the history of their nation and the collections the library holds

The Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH) is a major European initiative designed to provide heritage professionals and researchers with access to data and advanced digital tools. The goal of this course is...

Working at Yale means contributing to a better tomorrow. Whether you are a current resident of our New Haven-based community, eligible for opportunities through the New Haven Hiring Initiative, or a n...

Tarik Tuten of the Hafiz Ahmed Agha Library introduces this beautiful library in Rhodes and extends a warm welcome to all who wish to study its collections

Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): Wikidata is a collaboratively edited knowledge base containing data about 120 million entities; since its creation in 2013 it has been edited over 2.4 billion times by over 700,000 users (statistics from WikiScan as of 2026-05-18). Wikidata is one of the projects supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, the most famous of which is the oldest one, …

By Antonia Delle Fratte, PhD student at the University of Padua/Venice Ca' Foscari Since September 2025, I have been working on the reconstruction of the library collection of the Benedictine Monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, which was dispersed following the Napoleonic secularization at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This research is part of a doctoral project funded by the Italian government (PNRR), which began in 2022 under the joint doctoral programme of the University of Padua and Ca' Foscari Venice, under the supervision of Paola Molino (University of Padua) and Flavia De Rubeis (Ca' Foscari Venice).

By Dr Agnieszka Franczyk-CegłaCERL Provenance Working Group, Ossolineum National Library (PL) Being a rare book librarian involves a wide range of tasks. You might spend one moment deciphering a Latin inscription from the fifteenth century, and the next, dusting display cases, presenting a research paper at a conference, or explaining to a child what half a century means. In between, you also face the challenge of dealing with the legal and regulatory complexities of acquiring rare books from abroad.

By Janna Freiling, Information Management, Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts Anyone who has worked in a special collections reading room may have noticed that their use often raises practical questions. Researchers may wonder whether an appointment is required, how materials can be ordered, how long it takes for them to arrive, or whether photography is allowed. These questions often arise even before a visit, for example in enquiries to the library.

By Laura Semlič Thanks to the support of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL), I had the exciting opportunity to spend nearly five months at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, working on their collection of incunables. The first three months of this placement, between October and December 2025, were made possible by the CERL Internship and Placement Grant 2025. Because of the welcoming atmosphere at the museum and the fascinating material I was working on, I decided to extend my stay at the museum as a volunteer for two additional months, until February 2026.

Reporting to the Dean of the Library, the Director and Curator of Special Collections provides leadership, vision, and budget oversight for Middlebury’s special collections, including its rare book an...

By Carmen Oanea, PhD student in Book History at the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania My name is Carmen Oanea and I am a PhD student in Book History at the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. My research focuses on Jesuit libraries, tracing the provenance of volumes and looking for early modern readers. Before applying for an internship, I catalogued more than half of the incunabula preserved at the Academy Library in Cluj in MEI.

Notes on the Provenance of the Haliday Pamphlet and Tract Collections By Madeline Birnbaum, Assistant Archivist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston, Massachusetts. For four weeks in September of 2025, I was able to undertake an internship at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, Ireland, during which I researched the provenance of a pamphlet collection formerly owned by Charles Haliday.

By Debora Sturzo Thanks to the mediation of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and the support of the Erasmus+ Traineeship grant, I was able to carry out a three-month internship at the National Art Library of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, from June to September 2025, under the supervision of Catherine Yvard, special collection curator.  The National Art Library…

by Jemima Bennett, PhD candidate – University of Kent/Bodleian Libraries For four weeks in September and October 2025, I had the amazing opportunity, as a CERL grantee, to work with the incunables at the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation in Piraeus, Greece. My placement consisted of creating records for the books for CERL’s database, Material Evidence in Incunables (MEI), and linking these with images I had uploaded to CERL’s Provenance Digital Archive (PDA).

CERL was officially registered as a company on 24 June 1994. We celebrated our tenth anniversary at the National Library of Scotland in 2004 and were extremely pleased to be able to return to Edinburgh for our Annual General Meeting in October 2025. We were happy to welcome so many currently members to our meeting, and honoured to be able to welcome Dr Ann Matheson, former Chairman of CERL, as our guest.

“This course was very useful and packed with information.” — 2016 student Course Length: 30 hours Course Week: 31 May–5 June 2026 Format: in person, University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA Fee: ...

Studying the 'life' of Spanish incunabula at Huntington Library (San Marino, California) By Iván Pérez Marinas Huntington Library, San Marino, California Hola! My name is Iván Pérez Marinas, Curator of Manuscripts and Incunabula at the National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) and Ph.D. in Hispanic Medieval Studies from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Due to the fact that I got one of the CERL grants for 2025, I made a stay co-financed by the Huntington Library (San Marino, California) to collaborate for one month, from September 15 to October 14, researching copies of the Spanish incunabula that this institution has and including my results in…

YouTube video by CERL – Consortium of European Research Libraries

By Tomás de Brito, Ampersand In June 2025, Ediciones Ampersand became the first special member from South America to join the CERL community. We seize this opportunity to introduce ourselves through this blog entry by delving into the heart of our library: its founding collections. Fig. 1 Main window of the library. © photo, Pablo Cosgaya Before we discuss these matters, it is important to highlight our publishing activities, since the library is inseparable from them.

Dat de academische vrijheid onder druk staat, komt niet door de ‘linkse cancelcultuur’, betogen universitair docent Dick Zijp en universitair hoofddocent Mirko Tobias Schäfer. Zij hekelen de beeldvorm...

By Tomáš Klimek, National Library of the Czech Republic This year marks the 900th anniversary of the death of the first Czech chronicler, Cosmas, who served as dean of the Prague chapter and died in 1125. His life’s work, the Chronicle of the Czechs, written towards the end of his long life, is the earliest known account of Czech history. And without exaggeration, we can say that Cosmas didn’t merely record history – he helped shape it.

Dr Sarah M. Griffin, Curator of Unfolding Time: The Medieval Pocket Calendar From February to May 2025, Lambeth Palace Library hosted Unfolding Time: The Medieval Pocket Calendar.[1] The exhibition brought together a rare and remarkable type of medieval folded book for the first time—the concertina-fold almanac—and set them alongside treasures from Lambeth’s own collection. Folded in a zigzag pattern to form a neat, easily transportable packet of information, their playful form is emphasised by their colourful and almost entirely pictorial content, all of which relates to time.

By Louise Amazan, Daryl Green & Garrelt Verhoeven (IFLA RBSC) Introduction On April 24th 2025 the Standing Committee for Rare Books & Special Collections (RBSC) of IFLA and CERL’s Bookbinding group joined together for a seminar at the Bibliothèque National de France. With the title Médiations du patrimoine en bibliothèque: enjeux et perspectives / Meditations on Libraries and Heritage Collections…

Join us for this celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Sustainable Heritage MSc programme at UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage.