General research tips can be found on the GBV's VD 17 homepage under Help

Key pages

Since the start of the project, digital images of selected pages have been added to the title records to provide better information and to make it easier to differentiate between editions. Which pages do you usually find for a print?

• Title pages
• Pages with names of dedicatees
• Beginning of the main part
• Colophon
• Printer's mark

The image pages have not been post-processed. The quality can therefore vary considerably. If printed in red, legibility may be impaired. The digitized pages are not intended as facsimiles, but should provide more information about the print, e.g. the complete titles or personal details of dedication recipients. This should also make it easier to identify editions.
As a rule, digitization was carried out with one-bit colour depth (bitonal) and a resolution of 150-300 dpi. In the title records, the notes indicate from which copy the key pages were scanned.

Full digitized copies

Increasingly, full digitized copies are also being recorded in the VD 17 database, which have been searchable since February 2011. All fully digitized prints can be found by selecting the full text search option. It is not necessary to enter any further search terms.

Personal names

• The names of all authors, editors, translators, etc. have been entered according to the rules of the GND.
• However, the names of literary contributors (authors of dedicatory poems, prefaces, etc.), censors and dedication recipients are not subject to any standardized attribution, but are recorded according to the original. The names of artistic contributors [k.] and musical contributors [m.] are treated in the same way. The individual groups of people can be searched for separately. In order to find all prints containing contributions by a particular person, different forms of names must be used in the search. How to perform a truncated search is explained on the search entry page under Help.

Titels

The titles are reproduced without corrections or spelling mistakes. Search-relevant terms, on the other hand, are also recorded orthographically standardized. However, these additionally indexed terms are not displayed. For example, the title >Grosser Alt- und Newer Schreib-Calender can also be found with the keywords alter neuer Schreibkalender Kalender.

Printers and publishers / Places of printing and publishing

The names of printers and publishers are listed according to Josef Benzing's Die Buchdrucker des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts im deutschen Sprachgebiet, 2nd, verb. und erg. ed. Wiesbaden 1982, and several supplementary reference works. Today, the information from Benzing with all later additions is an integral part of the VD 17 database as standardized data. The title records are linked to the corresponding printers/publishers. This means that all titles from a particular printer can be retrieved.

The printing and publishing locations are also standardized. The standardization is based on the list of printing places of the 16th to 19th centuries Ansetzungs- und Verweisungsformen, compiled by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Wiesbaden 1991. According to this list, place names are given in the form commonly used in German, e.g. Strasbourg and not Strasbourg.

Fingerprint

The fingerprint is a combination of characters designed to make it easier to identify an edition. The method has already been tested in similar bibliographic projects in other European countries. As a rule, the four character groups are taken from the last and penultimate lines of the following pages:

• for the 1st group: the recto page following the title page
• for the 2nd group: the fourth recto page following the title page
• for the 3rd group: recto page 13
• for the 4th group: verso page of page 13

Example: enen 3.a- enn- geda 3 1647A

You can find more detailed information in Fingerprint. Rules and examples, based on the English-French-Italian edition of the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes (CNRS) and the National Library of Scotland, transl. and engraved by Wolfgang Müller. Berlin 1992.
For comparison, the Dutch method of identity verification based on the position of the sheet signatures of the STCN fingerprint. A short explanation of this method can be found on the pages of the AAD.

Collation

If there is no pagination in a print, the number of printed leaves is recorded. The number of leaves with illustrations is only given if the illustrations are on unpaginated pages. Illustrations on counted pages, on the other hand, are not noted individually.
They are also listed in the collation note:

The type of illustration is indicated in round brackets.
Ill. (copperplate)
Ill. (woodcuts)

All data records are fully indexed. This means that a search using the search terms Kupfer* or Holzschn*, for example, will find all works containing copperplate engravings or woodcuts. Similarly, prints with musical notes can be found by entering Noten*. The search options should be restricted to publications.

Bibliographical references

In VD 17, bibliographical references are also given when cataloging the titles. These bibliographies or corresponding reference works are particularly important in cases where, for example, authors or places of publication have been identified.
Frequently used directories are cited with the short title.
A further list of bibliographies for cataloging old prints from 1501–1850 was compiled by the AAD. This list of reference works with binding citation forms is regularly updated and supplemented.

Generic terms

For reasons of time and cost, subject indexing could not and cannot take place in the project. However, the assignment of around 190 genre and subject terms in the course of cataloguing provides a way of finding books by content. These are defined in a list of generic terms. However, as there are not suitable terms for all prints, it is also advisable to search using keywords from the title. By selecting the search key [GAT] Generic terms, you can search specifically for individual genres. Examples:

• Pamphlets with the search term: Flugschrift
• Emblem books: Emblembuch
• Medical dissertations: Dissertation: med.
• Funeral writings with the search term: Leichenpredigt oder Gelegenheitsschrift: Tod
• Illustrated broadsheets: gat Einblattdruck all ill*
• Architectural books illustrated with copperplates: gat Architektur all kupfer*

Language

The language of this text is given in coded form. The coding is in accordance with ISO 639.2: Languages and language characters. Only the languages of the main text are recorded. Prefaces, individual text passages or quotations in other languages are not taken into account. In the case of translations, the original language and, if applicable, an intermediary language are also specified. By entering the search command spr with the corresponding three-digit language code, the titles of a specific language can be selected, e.g. ger for German, lat for Latin, fre for French, ita for Italian or dut for Dutch. Unfortunately, it is not possible to differentiate between original, intermediate and existing languages when searching.

Examples:

• Prints in or from Spanish: spr spa
• Prints in or from Polish: spr pol
• Low German prints: spr nds

Provenances

As part of the cataloging process, the names of previous owners were also recorded in VD 17 by the majority of libraries. This makes it possible to trace the origin and history of a copy and thus reconstruct book collections that are scattered today. A good example is the library of the Nuremberg lawyer Johann Conrad Feuerlein (1725–1788). By selecting the search key PRV and entering the name Feuerlein, it is possible to determine the copies distributed across various VD 17 libraries in which Feuerlein's engraved bookplate can be found.

Copies from a particular library

The total number of copies in a library can be determined as follows:
Select the desired library, e.g. Rostock University Library <28>, and enter the search command epn 0*.

Search tip: Copies