In cooperation with the Provenance Research team at the Berlin State Library, we have developed a prototype provenance explorer

Provenance traces—that is, marks on a book that allow conclusions to be drawn about its previous owners and history—are catalogued in the k10plus union catalog. However, they have so far only been systematically analyzable with considerable effort. With the help of a Marimo notebook that accesses the union catalog’s SRU interface, the evaluation of provenance data and the identification of patterns and relationships in recorded provenance features are made easier.

Provenance Explorer makes it possible to bundle, analyze, and visualize search results for specific provenance features. An app view allows users to perform some basic functions and analyses, while provenance researchers who want to delve deeper can individually adapt the Python code of the notebook.

The example on the right shows, as an illustration, a selection that visualizes the provenance of holdings that once belonged to the library of the Seminar für Orientalische Sprachen (for more on the seminar, see also our edit-a-thon) as a sequence of stations.