BISPM Search Tips and Blog

British and Irish Studio Pottery Marks

New Entries, New Names, And The Old Frustrations

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been going through an index of potters in Traditional English Country Crafts, published in 1975, which as a treasure trove of studio potters and potteries operating in the UK in the 60s and 70s (the Dark Ages for Pottery marks). It’s added some of the missing information on […]

New Search Functions: Use – and * to replace unknown letters in a word

We’ve added a new search function, for searching on partial words, using – and *. A dash, or dashes, can be used to replace single letters in a word, eg, B-rry or B-r-y An asterix can be used to replace several letters in a word where you’re unsure how many there are, eg, Ba*y Although […]

Searching for Irish names that have an apostrophe

So today I discovered that I can’t search for names such as O’Gorman because the database doesn’t recognise the apostrophe. I thought it had been fixed when we discovered it was adding a ‘?’ in place of an apostrophe in the text but it seems to have broken again. I’m currently going through all the […]