Buntpapier: Beschreibung, Terminologie, Abbildungen
[Coloured paper: description, terminology, illustrations]
https://provenienz.gbv.de/Portal:Buntpapier
Decorative papers used in the book trade is an area of book history and bibliography that offers the most ambiguity in catalogue and metadata descriptions. Each country or region has different names for different techniques, and no one tool has emerged to help unify terminology under one glossary.
However, the German-language wiki Buntpapier, assembled and hosted by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation as a subset of their larger “ProvenienzWiki”, goes some way in at least providing a framework for how a database of this visual medium might function.
The immediate benefit of this platform is that most in-browser translation applications will have no problem converting these useful pages into English or any other language. Buntpapier provides a set of standard German terms, and then a description of how that type of decorative paper has been made, and then, most crucially, for most glossary terms one or more photos have been provided. From this basis, it is much easier to find the English correlating term to help improve cataloguing and teaching.
Daryl Green, member of Council
