Locating the Minister's Looted Books: From Provenance and Library History to the Digital Reconstruction of Print Culture

This article is a think-piece, exploring the potential for developing interoperable systems or unitary databases for collecting, storing, analysing, and cross-referencing various historical bibliometric data. It particularly focuses on the conceptual development, use, and benefits of such a database or databases in library history. The author surveys a range of leading digital library history and book history projects, establishing their uses and commonalities, before exploring how far the tools for developing a common database system are already being developed out of his 'French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe' (FBTEE) project by a team centred on the University of Western Sydney. In the process he also outlines much of the current work being done in library history by members of an international research network devoted to community libraries, and lays out a vision and hypothetical case study of how, and with what results, this work could be applied.