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Welcome to Melbourne Prints!

The Melbourne Prints website was developed during 2010 with the support of a Scholarly Innovation Grant from the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne. Catalogue entries for selected prints were prepared by students enrolled in the 2010 seminar Medieval Manuscripts and Early Print. In 2011 and 2012 our focus will be on a prints and rare books exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria: The Four Horsemen: Death and Disaster in Early Modern Europe, running from 31 August 2012 to 20 January 2013. Further details will be added closer to the exhibition dates.

This website showcases a range of significant pre-1700 prints and rare books held in the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne. The aim of this site is to document and deepen knowledge of the content, material production and provenance of these cultural objects; to enable students from different disciplines to learn about methods and processes of their storage, conservation and display; to make this knowledge more accessible; to understand the material condition of these objects, as well as the nature of conservation, ongoing maintenance, storage and display; and to publicize the material to other students and scholars locally, nationally and internationally. It is, thereby, a dynamic website, created and utilised by students and staff in a range of discipline areas across the University of Melbourne, and its content will expand over the years as students and staff complete appropriate work related to its content.

Students in several areas across the University have particular and discrete input into the site:

  • Students enrolled in the seminar Medieval Manuscripts and Early Print are guided in an assessment task which involves describing and documenting the content, material condition and production, provenance, historical and cultural significance of particular early printed objects in the Baillieu Library.
  • Students enrolled in the Breadth Subject, Learning Cultures: Minds, Ideas, Objects visit the Baillieu Print collection and are introduced to the conservation treatment and exhibition preparation of such objects.
  • Graduate students from the Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation provide condition reports for prints chosen for conservation and some will treat these as part of the subject Conservation Assessment and Treatment.
  • Students from Information Systems were commissioned to design and construct the site as an assessed Industry Project for their degree. The students were: Julie Vongchanh, Zhou Li, Ze-Yi Ng, Michihiko Nozue, Chloe Street and Daniel Yap.

This whole web project has been made possible by a Scholarly Innovation Grant from the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne.