TRY WORLDCAT FOR HALLMARK RESEARCH

[thesilverplatestash]

As a librarian, may I suggest a possible source for hallmark research that many of us may have overlooked.

Worldcat is the world's largest on-line bibliographic catalogue. It contains bibliographic data, including e-books, dissertations, musical works, etc., on over 2 billion materials held by libraries world-wide.

It is maintained by a consortium of professional librarians called OCLC. Access is completely free to anyone in the world. I think you will find the search features much more impressive than google. When researching hallmarks, it may be time-saving to use the "advanced" search feature and search under keywords; the, further narrow down your results by scrolling towards the bottom of a pertinent resource and click on the related subject headings. This will bring up all resources (in any format) that have been catalogued by a professional librarian under that subject heading - in other words, they have already narrowed the field down for you.

The search results will also show you what libraries physically contain that resource, in order of their distance to the location that you input when you create a (free) WorldCat account. If there is no library with that resource within a reasonable distance, you can request an inter-library loan if you hold a local library card. Yes, this service can be done internationally, although various libraries have various policies about it.

An example:

I searched for hallmarks for silver plated items made in New Zealand. After tweaking my search a couple of times (to narrow results down to English-only, etc.), this is what I came up with:

Shepherd, W., & Museum of New Zealand. (1995). Gold & silversmithing in nineteenth & twentieth century New Zealand. Wellington N.Z.: Museum of New Zealand.

So, a person named Shepherd has written a non-fiction book about silversmiths in New Zealand. Looking at the different subjects that the book has been catalogued under, I see that it contains silver hallmarks. I also see that the closest library (to me) that physically contains this item is in Chicago. If I wanted to pursue the question, I would request that my local library obtain the book from the library in Chicago.

Remember that WorldCat not only contains books from around the world; it also contains collections from many private archives, dissertations, universities, etc. etc. It may very well contain material that is not available on the internet, or at least not easily found on the internet (ie sales catalogues). In my search for New Zealand hallmarks, I found an image (digitalized photo) of a silver chalice used by an Australian chaplain in WWII, from the Australian military museum. Such information might be much harder to find via another search engine.

Good luck, and I'm sorry that this doesn't have a photo; I just wanted to contribute. I can't believe that I just thought of this myself!!

Teresa
thesilverplatestash

[dognose]

Hi Teresa,

Welcome to the Forum.

Thank you for posting the details of this most useful resource.

Trev.