The CERL Thesaurus : naming the world of early modern Europe
The CERL Thesaurus is one of the many resources made available by the Consortium of European Research Libraries. The linguistic diversity and the troubled history of Europe mean that there often are dramatic variations in names used for the same persons, be they names for authors, printers, publishers, or former owners, or for places or corporate bodies, such as former owning institutions. Such variations can be simply linguistic but they can also reflect past and present nationalistic policies. The Thesaurus can assist your search of all CERL resources by drawing on a very large number of authority files and authoritative records from CERL member institutions, and other contributors such as major bibliographical research projects. This means that, for instance, you don’t have to know its Danish, Latin, or Icelandic name in the correct grammatical case to search for books printed in Copenhagen in Latin or Icelandic. Your search for Copenhagen will give you even records which themselves only contain a Danish, Latin, or Icelandic name form.
Not only is it used for CERL resources: Individual libraries are free to use the Thesaurus for assisted searching of their own catalogues.
The records in the Thesaurus include links to images of printers’ devices and to other electronic resources, and draw in relevant rights-free images from Wikipedia. Place names are georeferenced. The Thesaurus is deliberately not an authority file itself, while it draws on numerous authority files, and authoritative records. Instead it offers all the recorded variants, letting you know where they have been used. The Thesaurus enables users to navigate this complexity, without CERL setting itself up as an international judge of what is the “proper” name of a city or a person.
In addition to being a tool for assisted searching, the Thesaurus is a useful source of reference for book-related people and places. Thus, the record for Wrocław will tell you the multitudinous names which the city has been given in imprints of books, and the names of printers and publishers who have been active in the city (in the screenshot only a small part of the many names appear). The non-normative approach means that the CERL Thesaurus in itself can be used to research and understand the multilayered geography of our continent. This is an aspect that is further enhanced because it is also available as Linked Open Data so that you can use it for your own data analysis or visualisation.
Kristian Jensen, Past President