A Database for Seal Impressions from the Islamicate World Development of a module for seal impressions as a modular extension of the Qalamos database. Standardised cataloguing and presentation across collections in a community-oriented research tool

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte; Professor Konrad Hirschler, Ph.D.; Dr. Daniel Kinitz; Dr. Stefan Kühne
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies ; Asian Studies ; Image and Language Processing, Computer Graphics and Visualisation, Human Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous and Wearable Computing ; Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561179358

Paratexts in manuscripts are playing an increasingly important role both for academic research and the cataloguing of provenance information on the part of libraries. These paratexts include handwritten notes as well as stamp or seal impressions. As a special form of ownership notes or as evidence for a donation, reading and inventory, seal impressions provide indispensable information for researching the object biographies of individual manuscripts and tracing the history of previous libraries. Today, they are often spread across collections worldwide. The lack of a resource for systematic work with these sources is perceived as a desideratum by the international research communities. To remedy this situation, the project applied for aims to develop an online research and working tool focused on seals as a modular extension of the manuscript portal "Qalamos". With the successful completion of the first funding phase of the Qalamos project (2020–23) and the results already visible in the second project phase, the metadata situation has improved considerably as the Islamic manuscripts in Germany are now almost fully catalogued. In phase 2, the standardised recording of personal data in the GND will be further accelerated, which will open up completely new research opportunities for provenance research, especially for sphragistics. This data is complemented congenially by the manuscript annotations recorded in the long-term Academy project "Bibliotheca Arabica". On the basis of this excellent database, questions and needs raised by the specialist community can now be better addressed. The initial plan is to identify seal impressions in manuscripts from the Islamicate world that are preserved in German collections and catalogued in Qalamos. Several thousand fully accessible digital copies offer enormous potential for the computer-supported identification of such impressions. This data will be supplemented by descriptive and image data provided by international partners and made accessible for researchers via the database and the feeding of standardised data into international directories. Researchers in cultural and book history will be given practical tools, such as the interactive service for automatically comparing an uploaded seal impression with the impressions already recorded in the database. Eventually, the module's functionalities can also make a concrete contribution in the fight against illegal trade in cultural property.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)