Retain Domain Specific Functionalities in a Generic Repository with Humanities Data

The project deals with a special type of medieval documentation: legal documents with images. These documents were created in many different contexts: indulgences from the Holy See in Avignon, grants of coats of arms, royal and imperial privileges, matrimonial contracts, to name a selection of prominent types. These documents are not easy to be found in archival collections but of high interest to art history, diplomatics and cultural history. Therefore, the FWF project Illuminated Charters as Gesamtkunstwerk (P 26,706) has created a collaborative service for their documentation integrated into the currently largest charter portal monasterium.net: http://www.monasterium.net/mom/IlluminierteUrkunden/collection. The work on the collection will continue after the formal completion of the FWF funding as the project is developing an active scholarly community. Monasterium.net offers easy to use editorial tools and integrates the collection into their context, but the portal currently offers no long term preservation oriented infrastructure. The project ensures the export of the data created in monasterium.net into the trusted repository for humanities data GAMS at the University of Graz (http://gams.uni-graz.at). GAMS is the leading repository for long term preservation oriented hosting of humanities data in Austria. It establishes standards, interfaces and workflows to allow continuous work in monasterium.net with easy data exchange into the repository. As standards the project creates XML/TEI P5 and RDF representations of the data, which are the widely accepted and openly defined standards for data storage in the Humanities. The project integrates IIIF based access to the images of the documents, which is a solution dedicated to distributed access to data and increasingly applied in libraries and archives for the digitized objects. For data exchange the project adds an OAI-PMH interface to monasterium.net, which is the major standard for metadata exchange applied amongst others in the Europeana. The project therefore demonstrates how data created, published and maintained in a well-established platform, which is dedicated to a special domain in humanities research, can be stored in long term oriented data repositories.

Charters are one of the most common types of manuscripts surviving from the middle ages and the basis for much historical research and study. This high value for historical research has lead to built Monasterium.net, the worldwide largest portal for this kind of historical sources representing more than 600.000 charters, with descriptions, transcriptions, and images. The digital representations of charters in this portal are provided by archives, digitized books, and from research done in the portal. The project dealt with this last group: The digital research results should be preserved on long terms. Monasterium.net itself has the advantage to support easy data creation with domain specific functionalities. It does not provide particular measurments for long term preservation. The project tried to establish a process, by which this research data could be exported and stored in the institutional repository of the University of Graz dedicated to humanities data "GAMS" (https://gams.uni-graz.at). This repositoriy follows the standards of long term data preservation and uses standards for data description. While the portal uses a legacy data model (the "Charters Encoding Initiative" schema CEI), research has established a more generic model for any kind of texts, the "Text Encoding Initiative" guidelines (TEI). The project defined models and procedures to convert the data from Monasterium.net into these standards, thus making it easier available for other kind of research (text mining, or person related research) and data reuse. Additionally the project identified a gap in the TEI standard in the field authentication. The project made a proposal to fill in this gap. The project had to deal in particular with heterogenity and inconsistence of the existing data. The multiple sources of the original data in Monasterium.net and different approaches to the research data used the incompleteness and interpretational space left by the original schema, if were not just neglectant of the definitions. The project tested a vast amount of entries and cleaned the data set in Monasterium.net. The project tested its methods with the data set from a former project on illuminated charters, i.e. legally binding historical documents with images or decorations on it (http://illuminierte-urkunden.uni-graz.at). It created a web interface to the the collection (http://gams.uni-graz.at/context:cord.illuminierteurkunden) demonstrating that the transfer of the data into the long term digital archive can provide even additional search facilities.