engleski

Contextualization and reconstruction of collections and items of old and rare books in digital environment

The fundamental role of humanities is the understanding, research and interpretation of objects and phenomena created by man, which means that research in humanities usually includes the study of original texts and objects of cultural heritage preserved in heritage institutions and which are then explored in their context in order to determine everything about the origin, use and other historical circumstances in which the object was created and used. Digital humanities realize the objectives of traditional humanities with the use of technology, i.e. a range of methods, tools and approaches that have changed the paradigm of research in humanities, but not their underlying objectives, i.e. ensuring that research subjects are observed and interpreted in their context. In addition to this, there are also methods used to contextualize objects of cultural heritage, but also to reconstruct collections or fragments of the same codex located in different institutions. The particularity of collections of old and rare books and manuscripts is their description which, due to specific user needs, involves the expansion of common cataloguing tasks, mostly by using descriptive elements and access points (Katić, 2007), which also enables the contextualization and reconstruction of collections and items of old and rare books from metadata. In this paper, special attention will be paid to the description of manuscripts and their fragments (Renhart, 2013), the possibility of using online catalogues in the reconstruction of collections and items of old and rare books, and the need to create databases that would enable the reconstruction of codicological units (Tomić, Willer, 2013). Since digital humanities entail research based on larger sets of (meta)data, the paper will question the possibility of using online catalogues as data sources for scientific research in digital humanities. Attention will be paid to the obstacles in the reconstruction of collections and codicological units, some solutions will be suggested and possibilities developed within digital humanities will be presented, such as the use of IIIF standards, visualization of information, etc. The paper will also address other matters such as the interoperability of metadata between different systems as a prerequisite for contextualization of written cultural heritage, i.e. the issue of using common regulations for the description and access to cultural heritage books with the aim of enabling contextualization of cultural heritage and the reconstruction of collections and items in the context of research within digital humanities.

digital humanities, old and rare books, contextualization, reconstruction

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