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Provenance history sheds light on the relationship between works of art and the social, political, and economic conditions of their biographies. Engaging with the provenance of objects establishes a cultural conversation across time and space with previous owners. For artworks in museums, the public has now entered into that conversation. Museums, as custodians of art and educators of the public, can play a significant role in going beyond the question of ownership to get to the heart of what provenance reveals about the meanings of art: the ways people bring art into their lives, and the ways that objects are loved and studied. This essay delves into these human aspects of provenance, which are too often absent from museum displays, and argues in favor of making this information more visible to the public. Finally, works by contemporary artists Hans Haacke and Maria Eichhorn are discussed as examples of projects that successfully expose complicated object histories and provenance within museum installations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his grand Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries , Neil Ker identified, in two different repositories, the extensive remains of a single sixteenth-century library. This had clearly been gathered together before the Dissolution from the book collections of a variety of religious houses, all of those identifiable in the city of Chester. The essay traces the probable passage of these volumes from their initial collection to their present repositories, Gray's Inn and Shrewsbury School. In this account, the initial collector, William Wall, eventually prebendary of Chester Cathedral, had passed these on to a recusant family, the Egertons, and they, in turn, descended through an illegitimate daughter to the Bostocks, who donated them to their present institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the rise of the study of the history of the book in the 1980s and 1990s, provenance studies have become an important component in the research of social and cultural historians. This development was noticed and embraced by the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL). The Consortium incorporated results of provenance research in existing resources and created new resources specifically with the question of provenance in mind. In this contribution I will focus on two CERL resources: the Material Evidence in Incunabula Database and the recently developed CERL Provenance Digital Archive and the relation between the two. Examples will show how these two digital resources stimulate international cooperation in the field of provenance research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provenance study of the artificial products among the archaeological artifacts is an important content of the archaeological research. The relevant methods applied in the academic field at present all have their effectiveness as well as limitations. Focusing on the practices and experiences in the study on the bronze mirror casting industry in the Linzi City Site of the Qi State in Shandong, this paper puts forward the provenance estimation method based on the styles and distributions of the artificial products, which suggests that different production places (origins) produced different local styles, while the products made in each origin were circulated in the zone with the origin as the center. Therefore, according to the spatial distribution of the artificial products, the location with the most densely distributed products with this style could be inferred as their origin. Then, this paper discussed the identification and summarization of the "origin style", the observation and analyses of the regional distribution and the estimation and confirmation of the origins, the scope of application of this method and other relevant issues in the application of this provenance estimation method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a biography of a collection of eleven Arabic manuscripts at the library of the Università degli Studi di Napoli L'Orientale (UNO). These manuscripts do not contain otherwise unknown or even rare texts, since the titles in the collection exist in dozens of manuscript copies in northern African libraries in addition to printed editions. While the bulk of their content may be known to historians, the objects themselves have led rich social lives that merit attention. Like many biographies, however, the story of these objects suffers from a lack of detail. In this article, I suggest that if approached in the aggregate, the long-term provenance of Arabic manuscript collections like this one have a fascinating story to tell about their social histories. Even in the absence of every detail, these objects have much to say about the multiple and overlapping historical contexts through which they have moved. I begin by showing how these manuscripts at the UNO started their lives as Italian papers, situating them in the world of maritime and terrestrial trade that linked the northern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean from the 17th-20th centuries. I then demonstrate how the production and circulation of these texts speaks to widespread intellectual networks of a Muslim minority community and its manuscript culture in the Maghrib during the 18th and 19th centuries when the Ottoman empire attempted to exercise influence over the region. Finally, I show the ways in which these manuscripts were participants in the process of European (specifically, Italian) colonization and colonial knowledge production in northern Africa at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. By placing the aggregated biographies of the manuscripts in dialogue with the history of the broader Mediterranean world, I show how Arabic manuscript collections like this one have much to offer historians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the 1543 and 1555 copies of Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica in the British Library and University College London. The texts were examined for provenance information, looking at copyspecific evidence to investigate the ownership history from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. A wide range of provenance methods were explored to extract relevant information on use, readership, and ownership, considering how far these texts were used as practical medical textbooks, especially after the rise of book collecting in the eighteenth century. The collection habits of notable figures such as Sir Hans Sloane and Joseph Smith are considered through their ownership of medical texts. A previously unrecorded book stamp is also identified. This case study supports recent census research on Vesalius texts, suggesting that its readership was varied, and was not limited to an elite audience merely for display purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Provenance information is crucial for consistent maintenance of metadata schemas over time. The purpose of this paper is to propose a provenance model named DSP-PROV to keep track of structural changes of metadata schemas.Design/methodology/approach The DSP-PROV model is developed through applying the general provenance description standard PROV of the World Wide Web Consortium to the Dublin Core Application Profile. Metadata Application Profile of Digital Public Library of America is selected as a case study to apply the DSP-PROV model. Finally, this paper evaluates the proposed model by comparison between formal provenance description in DSP-PROV and semi-formal change log description in English.Findings Formal provenance description in the DSP-PROV model has advantages over semi-formal provenance description in English to keep metadata schemas consistent over time.Research limitations/implications The DSP-PROV model is applicable to keep track of the structural changes of metadata schema over time. Provenance description of other features of metadata schema such as vocabulary and encoding syntax are not covered.Originality/value This study proposes a simple model for provenance description of structural features of metadata schemas based on a few standards widely accepted on the Web and shows the advantage of the proposed model to conventional semi-formal provenance description. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on changes in ownership of British legal history source manuscripts and materials including a notebook in the hand of Sir Peter King, recorder of London then chief justice of the Common Pleas; a February 1857 autograph letter from Lord Cranworth LC to Mr Serjeant Wrangham regarding appointments for the queen's serjeants (sic); and the 18th century book "The Proceedings of His Majestie's Court of Exchequer" by Sir Jeffrey Gilbert.

Aim/Purpose With information almost effortlessly created and spontaneously available, current progress in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has led to the complication that information must be scrutinized for trustworthiness and provenance. Information systems must become provenance-aware to be satisfactory in accountability, reproducibility, and trustworthiness of data. Background Multiple models for abstract representation of provenance have been proposed to describe entities, people, and activities involved in producing a piece of data, including the Open Provenance Model (OPM) and the World Wide Web Consortium. These models lack certain concepts necessary for specifying workflows and encoding the provenance of data products used and generated. Methodology Without loss of generality, the focus of this paper is on OPM depiction of provenance in terms of a directed graph. We have redrawn several case studies in the framework of our proposed model in order to compare and evaluate it against OPM for representing these cases. Contribution This paper offers an alternative flow-based diagrammatic language that can form a foundation for modeling of provenance. The model described here provides an (abstract) machine-like representation of provenance. Findings The results suggest a viable alternative in the area of diagrammatic representation for provenance applications. Future Research Future work will seek to achieve more accurate comparisons with current models in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented which explores why more recent provenance can be crucially important and why the site-based decision making (SBDM) can be an extremely valuable tool when researching the medieval origins of a manuscript. It outlines a brief overview of the manuscript and the explicit evidence of its twentieth-century provenance. It also notes that the nineteenth-century provenance is crucial in leading to evidence of the precise origin of the book.

The article discusses Anglican clergyman and author Michael Sherbrook and the provenance of MS GG. 3.33 held in the collection of Cambridge University Library. Sherbrook authored the book "The Fall of the Religious Houses" regarding the dissolution of the church in England after being a witness to the pillage of the Cistercian monastery of Roche Abbey in West Riding of Yorkshire. The manuscript was part of Roche Abbey's library and was owned by Sherbrook. The manuscript provides commentary on the Psalms.

The author reflects on the ten rules for provenance in a variety of experiments. The author discusses the ways on how to improve the experimentation, the use of spreadsheets, and barcoding in labeling physical object or databases. The author also mentioned the use of electronic laboratory notebooks, reformatting for error correction, and extraction of metadata.

This article presents a new, detailed catalogue of the Greek manuscripts at the Wellcome Library in London. It consists of an introduction to the history of the collection and its scholarly importance, followed by separate entries for each manuscript. Each entry identifies the text(s) found in the respective manuscript – including reference to existing printed edition(s) of such texts – and gives a physical description of the codex, details on its provenance and bibliographical references. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the first centuries of Islam, the written notation of the Qur'an underwent a gradual evolution. After an early stage represented by the 'Ḥijāzī' tradition, red dots were introduced into 'Kūfic' Qur'ans to mark short vowels. This system was soon expanded by assigning more functions to the red dots, sometimes supplemented by yellow, green, and blue dots; and by creating new orthographic signs. These devices were used in different ways by different vocalisers. Few textual sources dealing with this subject survive. By far the most consequential is al-Muḥkam fī naqṭ al-maṣāḥif (lit. 'The Precise on the Vocalisation of Qur'ans') by Abū ʿAmr ʿUthmān b. Saʿīd al-Dānī (371-444/982-1053). Following a line of work initiated by Yasin Dutton, the present study, to be published in two parts, will confront the assertions of al-Muḥkam with a sample of key manuscripts in an attempt to gain insights into the regional origins of early Qur'ans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the provenance of a manuscript fragment of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "The Loss of the Eurydice," owned by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin. Topics addressed include a description of the document and its origins, commentary on its historical context surrounding Hopkins' life in 1883-1884, and discussion of the document's connection to letters to the Hopkins' sister Grace.

The article looks at a draft fragment of the poem "To Ianthe" by George Gordon Byron which contains a draft of the poem's second stanza and which is housed in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, Poland. Particular focus is given to the fragment's provenance. It was originally passed from Byron to his friend John Cam Hobhouse and later came into the possession of the Royal Library at Berlin, Germany, from which it was transferred to present-day Poland during World War II.

The article looks at a fair copy manuscript of the essay "The Decay of Lying: A Dialogue" by Oscar Wilde. The authors present information on the manuscript's provenance and its 2012 rediscovery at the University of Akron. It is suggested that the revisions present in the manuscript are relevant to the essay's most important formal aspects and provide insight into Wilde's creative process. The relationship between the characters Cyril and Vivian is also discussed.

The article argues that the transcription manuscript (MS Eng 1660) of several 17th century texts of English plays including "Mankind," "Nice Wanton," and "Gammer Gurtons Needle," gifted by scholar John Matthews Manly to Harvard University’s Houghton Library attributed to Mrs. Agnes Furnivall, reportedly the wife of 19th century textual scholar Frederick James Furnivall. In actuality, Agnes was Frederick's second cousin by marriage. Born Agnes Parker Ackroyd, she married Penn Furnivall in 1873 and identified herself as an artist and illustrator who transcribed documents for supplementary income.