Digitising Croatian Latin Writers
Digitising Croatian Latin Writers
Abstract
Croatian Latin literature is usually taken to mean the body of works
written in Latin both in the region that is today Croatia, and by
authors of Croatian origin. The corpus of such literature comprises
- according to a recent bibliographical survey [1] -
3685 authors and 5994 (printed) titles, written from Middle Ages
until modern times. The Croatiae auctores Latini
[2], a digital collection in the making, aims to make
accessible as many of these authors and works as possible. But, how
should it be done?
A collection wants to be used; therefore, it has to attract its
users, enabling them to do something not possible without the
collection. Moreover, if a collection which wants to be used offers
material that is exotic, almost unknown, it also has
to provide as many background information as possible. Finally, if a
collection is built with limited resources, it has to rely on its
main asset: the community of its users (along the lines of
commons-based peer production[4]).
So the Croatiae auctores Latini digital collection should
include not only texts in its three "aggregate states" of
digitisation (as images, as text only, and encoded in different
levels[3]). The collection should also include search
facilities and secondary literature. To maximally engage its user
community, the collection should be open - making it easy to
correct, enhance, or add texts and other resources, giving due
credit to each contributor - and flexible enough to be used even
for the purposes the designers have not envisaged.
To conclude, I will sketch what we currently have and what we do not
have, pointing also to the initiatives and institutions - Croatian
and foreign - which we see as natural allies of the planned
collection.
References
- [1]
- National and University Library Zagreb contributors, "Katalog 045: Hrvatski latinisti" (= Catalogue 45: Croatian Latin Writers), <http://161.53.3.18/liste/045/> [accessed April 28, 2008].
- [2]
- Jovanović, Neven, "Digitization of Croatian Latin writers: a research project proposal", <http://www.ffzg.hr/klafil/dokuwiki/fetch.php?cache=cache\&media=z\%3A060321digi.html> [accessed April 28, 2008].
- [3]
- "TEI Text Encoding in Libraries: Guidelines for Best Encoding Practices, Version 1.0 (July 30, 1999)", <http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/tei/> [accessed April 28, 2008].
- [4]
- Wikipedia contributors, "Commons-based peer production," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, <http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons-based_peer_production\&oldid=193586738> [accessed April 28, 2008].
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