The retrospective national bibliography has been building in the Hungarian National Library for several decades. The outcome of the work has earned international acclaim since not only bibliographic processing but recording the history of each edition is accomplished. We keep an inventory on copy data aswell. As a result of this research program a new database system is created in order to study history of Hungarian civilisation in the 16-17 century. Databases contain findings of basic researches characterized by a quantity approach. This approach is seldom applied in similar researches. Moreover, the multimedia display of the significant portion of the corpus is exceptional (books, bindings, illustrations).