The Archive Owners of the Montevergine State Library

The Montevergine State Library is an Italian public library depending on the Minister of Culture. It was originally an ecclesiastical library which, in the second half of the 19th century, became public following the enactment of the laws on suppression of the religious corporations. It is located inside the Loreto Abbey Palace in Mercogliano (Avellino, Italy). Nowadays the Montevergine State Library is a modern office offering all tipical public libraries services, including document reproduction, local loan and interlibrary loan. Logging in the institutional website of the Montevergine State Library, you can consult the Archive Owners in the Special Catalogues section. The books, especially the ancient ones, are filled with ex-libris, stamps, manuscript annotations, bindings, etc. These indications, although are signs that smear the books, nevertheless are elements that must be taken into account when cataloguing a book and describing the specimen you own. In 2013 a new version of the library's website was released and on that occasion the Archive Owners was implemented. Its original nucleus was derived from the systematic work of cataloguing the 16th century editions possessed: this work started in 2002 and ended in 2015 with the publication of the printed catalogue Le cinquecentine della Biblioteca di Montevergine. A large sample of possession notes are present on the 1050 editions of the sixteenth century owned by the Montevergine State Library; the right prominence was given to these notes in the Archive Owners published on the institutional website. The work is still in progress, in fact the Archive is integrated from time to time whenever there is a new note of possession on the books present in the library. In most cases it was possible to draw up a complete biographical record of the owner, also accompaned by photos, one or more.jpg files in which the various formulas used by the owner are scanned and the links to bibliographic information in the library's opac.