CERL's work and vision for provenance research I: CERL Thesaurus, Material Evidence in Incunabulla, and the 15cBOOKTRADE Project

The Consortium of European Research Libraries is a membership organisation, involving an active community of over 260 European and American libraries and research institutions, and steadily growing, each with a keen focus on cultural heritage in the form of early printed books and manuscripts. Collaboratively, CERL member libraries and scholars in the field develop digital resources which make possible integrated research on their European written heritage. CERL's attention to the integration and retrieval of Provenance records, internationally, is unparalleled. They do this successfully in the CERL Thesaurus (CT), the Heritage of the Printed Book (HPB) database, the Portal, the Material Evz1 dence in Incunabula (MET) database, Can You Help database and circulation list, by offering a public platform to important research data gathered by individual scholars, such as Meg Ford's Early Book Owners in Britain (EBOB) and Paul Needham's Index Possessorum Incunabulorum (IPT), and in the CERL webpages dedicated to resources for Provenance research in the world.