21 September 2026

Seal impressions provide invaluable information on a manuscript’s biography. To record them across collections and make them accessible for research, the project ‘Database for Seal Impressions from the Islamic Cultural Sphere’ receives more than €700,000 in funding from the German Research Foundation.

Many historical libraries and collections from the Islamic world have been dispersed over time. Their holdings are now scattered across numerous countries and institutions. Reconstructing these libraries is a complex task, and seal impressions can provide important clues. They document ownership, endowments, reading sessions, and inventories, helping researchers to trace the journeys of individual manuscripts. They can also shed light on the history of collections and support efforts to document the illicit trade in cultural property.

A new collaborative project puts these important paratextual sources centre stage, examining their functions, chronological and geographical contexts, and the people and institutions associated with them. The project also explores how the position and size of a seal can reveal information about a manuscript’s biography, even if the seal is fragmentary, blurred, or deliberately effaced.

Seals will not only be described in textual form but also recorded visually and linked to the relevant manuscripts. A central aim is to develop tools to detect and identify seal impressions automatically in large bodies of digitised material. Pattern-recognition methods are intended to enable image-similarity searches and to combine several incomplete impressions virtually. Users will also be able to upload their own images, supplement existing records and suggest corrections.

The project is a collaboration of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Bibliotheca Arabica at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig, the Leipzig University’s Computing Centre, and the CSMC. It combines expertise in Islamic studies, library history, provenance research, and sphragistics with specialist knowledge of data modelling, pattern recognition, and digital infrastructure. Numerous partner institutions in Germany and abroad are also involved, including the British Library, the Chester Beatty Library, the Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Topkapı Palace, Qatar National Library, and the universities of Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Funding is provided by the German Research Foundation’s (DFG) Scientific Library and Information Systems (LIS) programme, in the funding area Digitisation and Indexing. Results will be made available through open access and as open-source software, and the data will become part of Qalamos, the German union catalogue for African and Asian manuscripts.