engleski

Manuscript description in the digital age

Digital age enables new capabilities of manuscript description and fosters its research. Although there is a convention regarding manuscript description, due to the uniqueness of each manuscript, as well as to different needs of different types of scholars interested in those descriptions/manuscripts, there is no strict standard for manuscript description. “A good manuscript description” typically includes information on the content, physical characteristics and history of the manuscript, and there is a number of conventions by which those aspects are normally described (Clemens, Graham, 2007). Description is usually done in great details, but mostly in unstructured, descriptive manner, and by the use of sometimes inconsistent terminology. Burrows emphasises the inconsistency in the use of terminology and descriptive standards in manuscript description as a cause of difficulties in “finding, using and sharing knowledge about mediaeval manuscript collections” (Burrows, 2010), The solution of the problem is seen in the international collaborative infrastructure for organizing content and interlinking knowledge, as it is offered by the technological environment of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data (Tomić, Willer, 2013). The benefits of the use of semantic relationships are already proven, and can be presented as relationships that provide search with no “dead ends”, the ones that “bring data to life and provide more interesting and varied paths for people to follow” (Oldman et al., 2014). These could be used as an ideal image of manuscript catalogue used as a tool for humanities researcher’s work or for a starting point of the research. Manuscript catalogues are useful and searchable only if metadata is well structured and if a set of relationships between manuscript records data, as well as relationships between manuscript records data and other entities (person, place, time, etc.) mirrors the complex historical, social, cultural, economy, political and other contexts of the described manuscript, not only within local catalogue, but wider. The case study described in this presentation is derived from the project Digitization, bibliographic description and research of texts written in Glagolitic, Croatian Cyrillic and Latin scripts until the end of the 19th century in the Zadar and Šibenik area (Written heritage), which is organized by the Department of Information Sciences of the University of Zadar, Croatia and VESTIGIA Manuscript Research Centre of the University of Graz, Austria. Alongside with digitization and research, the goal of the project is description of manuscripts, while the complementary goal is fostering cooperation between manuscript researchers and information specialists, as well as the integration of manuscript research results, manuscript catalogues and other databases and digitized resources, as well as scientific and research publications in order to make the project portal a real virtual research space. A catalogue is considered to be a central point of that virtual research space, and as such, has to support the growing and changing needs of digital humanities researchers. The presentation will show the model of manuscript description used within the project Written heritage using INDIGO information system (ArhivPRO), namely the selection of data elements required for manuscript description, metadata standards and guidelines used for description, semantic web technology implementation, terminology issues, building of authority files and integration of manuscript catalogue with watermark database, manuscript presentation issues and other solutions that contribute to the reconstruction of historical, social and other manuscript contexts.

manuscripts, manuscript description, semantic web, digital humanities

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