AEPM annual conference | Colloque annuel de l’Association of European Printing Museums. Exploring printing heritage in theory and in practice. 3-5 September 2025, Winterbourne House, University of Birmingham, UK

With a conference by Anna Baydova: A database of Renaissance printing types and engraved materials: BATYR

The AEPM annual conference is being hosted this year by the Centre for printing history and culture (CPHC) and  Winterbourne House & Garden at the University of Birmingham (UK). The theme of the conference is the relationship between printing history and heritage sites that are custodians of the material evidence of print.

The theme of the conference

Over the past few years, digital humanities and craft revival have prompted a resurgence of interest in analogue forms of communication and the technologies that enabled them. Letterpress, the once dominant printing process is now commercially obsolete and offset lithography is increasingly challenged by digital printing. The numbers of people trained in historical printing techniques are declining and heritage organisations often struggle to find the space, resources, or know-how to curate their printing collections. Usable equipment and material are becoming increasingly scarce, and those with the knowledge to repair and restore it are a dying breed. Preservation requires documentation, interpretation, and practice but also imaginative approaches to their adaptation and use in the present. Heritage sites provide the raw material—artefacts, machinery, documents, and archives—and experiential environments by which historians can understand the situations and locations of printing. On the other hand, printing historians produce the necessary context—information, data, interpretation, and scholarly assessment—necessary for the heritage sites to effectively exploit their collections and interpret printing history for a wide audience.

This conference will consider the role of printing heritage in the twenty-first century and discuss the interdependent relationship between heritage sites and printing historians — how it works, how it could it work, the benefits, problems, and possible new models for working.

Program & details

With a conference by Anna Baydova: A database of Renaissance printing types and engraved materials: BATYR

Launched in 2012 as part of the Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes (BVH) digitisation programme, BaTyR (Base de Typographie de la Renaissance) is a database that, until 2024, focused exclusively on the decoration of editions printed in Europe between the 15th and 17th centuries. Using automatic extraction tools developed by the University of Tours and applied to the BVH’s digital facsimiles, it has made it possible to index, describe and identify decorative materials (ornamental letters, fleurons, etc.) in order to study the circulation of engraved blocks and decorative motifs, in particular by distinguishing original plates from their copies.

From 2023 to 2027, the French National Research Agency is funding the development of the database as part of the TypoReF (« Typographie de la Renaissance Française, 1470-1640 ») research project. The new version of the database will be freely available online from spring 2025. BaTyR now uses the IIIF protocol, which allows access to the entire content of electronic libraries. The project includes the addition of new tables for the indexing and description of fonts of types, linked to the main reference repositories (TW, Vervliet, French Post-Incunabulas, etc.), as well as original printing materials : woodblocks, punches, matrices, and archival documents mentioning them. For the moment, it is devoted to French printing materials, but it could be opened up more widely.  We hope that in the future, this new tool will make it possible to identify anonymous editions, to study in greater depth the main printers involved in the evolution of typographic forms, to analyse the conditions under which materials were produced and sold, and to develop new image analysis tools based on the principles of artificial intelligence.

The aim of this paper is to present the new version of the BaTyR database and to explain its new functionalities and the content elements which will be useful for librarians, historians, graphic designers and typographers.

 

All about th conference program & details on the AEPM website: 


OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Sandrine Breuil (2 septembre 2025). AEPM annual conference | Colloque annuel de l’Association of European Printing Museums. Exploring printing heritage in theory and in practice. 3-5 September 2025, Winterbourne House, University of Birmingham, UK. Bibliothèques Humanistes. Consulté le 8 décembre 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/14lla


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