Il contesto europeo delle banche dati bibliografiche di ricerca

This paper compares the highly integrated landscape of national and international bibliographical databases—territory which includes specialist databases focusing on the productions of the printing press in a certain period or area or language—with the lack of a similarly integrated system which can cope with the investigation of copy-specific evidence (also known as material, post-production, or provenance evidence) recorded in electronic catalogues. A suggestion is made here of a way by which provenance data from the RICI database can be integrated into the CERL Thesaurus. Finally, the paper discusses a range of publications and ongoing projects which focus on the medieval and early modern booklist as a class of document, to set the Italian experience, and RICI in particular, in its European context. If these kinds of sources, which are documentary and bibliographical at the same time, are to be integrated within the current research landscape, then new or modified linking tools might be needed.