Sustainable infrastructure for scholarly digital editions at the Austrian National Library

The sustainable infrastructure for digital editions at the Austrian National Library provides a framework for all digital edition projects based on on the holdings of the Austrian National Library. The edition infrastructure combines components for creating the digital edition with a repository component for versioning and publication of the edition’s online presentation.

The technical basis of the edition infrastructure is an independent instance of the Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System (GAMS), which has been developed at the Centre for Information Modeling (ZIM-ACDH) of the Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz.

For the creation component, we rely on the XML editor Oxygen, for which a project framework is set up for each edition project. In addition, all XML files are stored versioned using a GitLab repository. We provide an extensive training for every team of editors at the beginning of the edition project.

The edition infrastructure has a modular structure so that the basic configuration that is provided for each edition can be adapted on a project-specific basis. The basic modules not only include the TEI-XML-based basic data model, but also the generic design of the online presentation with templates for the starting page, indices, editorial texts (incl. commentary) and the synoptic view for the purpose of uniform user guidance as well as a reusable uniform logo design for each individual digital edition.

The creation of the edition infrastructure received significant support from the Competence Network for Digital Editions (KONDE).