Charters Open Research 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.netoffers easy to use editorial tools and integrates the collection intotheir 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. 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 interfaceto monasterium.net, which is the major standard for metadataexchange 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.

The project is funded by the FWF ORD 84.