Stand und Perspektiven der Wasserzeichenforschung

Research on Watermarks – State and Perspectives. Research on watermarks is commonly accepted nowadays as an auxiliary field of history. In certain circumstances, watermarks are able to narrow the date of origin of written sources down to a few years. During the last two decades, watermark research has drawn growing interest by the scientific community. Printed watermark repertories as well as new collections of watermarks from written and printed sources were published online in the frame of a series of projects. A common search interface for the most important of these databases was created in the EU-project 'Bernstein - The Memory of Paper'. The new databases are particularly used for dating mediaeval manuscripts. This paper intends to provide an overview of online databases of watermarks and of modern techniques for their visualisation.