2026 marks 20 years of the Ligatus Summer School. A symposium to review and plan the future of bookbinding study will be held on Saturday between week 1 and week 2 of the Summer School in Rome.
20 years of bookbinding studies - the contribution of the St Catherine's Monastery Library survey
provisional programme - registrations to open soon
Saturday 26th Sep 2026
Istituto Centrale per la Patologia degli Archivi e del Libro
Via Milano 76, 00184 Rome - Italy
9:00-9:30: Registration and welcome, coffee and tea
9:30-10:20: History of ICPAL, scope and future directions
Michela Palazzo, director of Istituto Centrale per la Patologia degli Archivi e del Libro (ICPAL)
Role of ICPAL, highlight of important projects, future directions. Ending with the question: how do institutions share and combine resources/databases? Issues around copyright, photography, metadata etc. How do institutions approach long-term support of resources? How to combine databases of decorative data with databases of structural data.
Then and now: a review/summary of activity triggered by the St. Catherine’s survey
Nicholas Pickwoad
10:20-10:50: The study of endbands - a methodology based on observation
George Boudalis
The talk aims to briefly present the process of doing extensive research for years on the endbands used in the bookbinding traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean which culminated with the writing and illustrating of a book on the subject. Focusing on the main methodological tools of the research, the talk intends to stress the importance of combining observation, database information, analytical and synthetic thinking, manual and drawing skills to allow replicating, recording and sharing technical knowledge which is often too complicated and too difficult to communicate to the wider community of book specialists.
10:50-11:20: Coffee break
11:20-11:50: Sharing records - the challenges of copyright and licensing
Karen Limper Herz
11:50-12:20: In words and images: twenty years of documenting bookbinding structures
Alberto Campagnolo, KU Leuven / CESR University of Tours
Over the past two decades, the documentation of bookbinding structures has grown markedly richer and more connected. This paper reviews that development along two complementary lines.
The first concerns how a description is represented, a long move from prose towards structured, granular data. Systematic, computerised recording of bindings goes back to the 1980s. Ligatus's own condition survey of the library of Saint Catherine's Monastery on Sinai carried this into a sustained methodology, feeding a dedicated XML schema and, later, the 'Language of Bindings', a multilingual thesaurus of binding concepts. Expressed as Linked Data, such descriptions break out of local silos and enrich wider catalogues.
The second concerns the visual record, since a binding's structure is spatial and resists description in words alone. It takes two forms. Diagrams, long drawn by hand to convey gathering and sewing, can also be generated automatically once the structure has been modelled in sufficient detail, as in VisColl, rendering complex arrangements legible at a glance. Direct imaging, by contrast, captures the object itself, where raking-light, spectral, photogrammetric and micro-tomographic techniques, once specialist and costly but increasingly affordable, bring out material features beyond ordinary perception.
Together they are making the binding both more fully seen and more widely shared. The next twenty years may be less about recording bindings in isolation than about connecting everything we can now read in them.
12:20-12:50: Italian census of Medieval Bookbindings (CLEM)
Carlo Federici
13:00-14:30: Lunch break
14:30-15:00: From the condition survey to the digitisation: datasets from the Saint Catherine's Monastery Library in potential crossroads
Damianos Katsotakis, Director of Imaging for the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library and Athanasios Velios, Data Manager at English Heritage and former Ligatus researcher
The library of Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt, holds a unique collection of books that provides significant evidence for the history of the Monastery and the broader region, as well as for the development of bookbinding as a craft. The collection is regularly the subject of study and has led to a number of projects documenting the books and publishing research data and observations. St. Catherine's Monastery in collaboration with the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library (EMEL) and the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) have published the Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library providing high resolution images of manuscripts for several of the Library’s collections. Previously the Ligatus research centre at the University of the Arts London and Camberwell College of Arts with support from the Saint Catherine Foundation produced descriptions and collected photographs of the bindings of the manuscripts and early printed books of the Library. Several other bibliographical datasets exist from earlier documentation and cataloguing projects. This contribution will highlight the value of this research material and propose their linking and cross-searching in a shared platform. A proposal of a potential technical solution will be made for data integration alongside a set of prerequisites that may enable such a project.
15:00-15:30: ARXIVE: Linked Data and Research Tools for Book Conservation Documentation
Nikolas Sarris, Book and Paper Conservator, National Library of Greece
The growing body of digitised collections and conservation documentation offers new possibilities for investigating manuscripts and historical books, bringing together information that can support both their preservation and their scholarly interpretation. At the same time, valuable evidence is frequently dispersed across different documentation systems and formats. ARXIVE (Advanced Research and eXploration for Interoperable Value in European Heritage) is a Horizon Europe project addressing these challenges through interoperable semantic infrastructures, linked data, AI-assisted tools, and collaborative workflows developed within the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH). The National Library of Greece (NLG) is one of ARXIVE’s principal pilot institutions, bringing together four complementary use cases, exploring different ways in which conservation documentation and physical evidence can be connected with digital research tools.
15:30-16:30: Panel discussion on the challenges of sharing records going forward
16:30: Closing remarks, symposium photo and departure