Digitisation, indexing and presentation of the archive of the Regensburgische Botanische Gesellschaft (Botanical Society of Regensburg)
Final Report Abstract
With the digitization and presentation of the copyright-free documents of the Archive of the Regensburg Botanical Society on freely available platforms, the Regensburg University Library was able to make these unique manuscripts accessible for research and teaching. The collection of documents in the archive is of interest to scientists of all disciplines. It has been kept since the founding of the society in 1790 and includes, among other things, minutes of meetings, travel reports, reports of plant discoveries, and an extensive correspondence of botanists and other scholars. The project goals were, on the one hand, the digitization of the copyright-free documents, on the other hand, a completion of the indexing as well as the presentation and permanent provision of the digital copies and their metadata on publicly accessible platforms. The archive's holdings are indexed at the level of individual documents in the Kalliope union catalog; missing information was added here as part of the project and a small selection of documents were encoded in the TEI/P5 format of the Text Encoding Initiative Version P5 or in XML, with metadata and TEI headers, structural elements and editorial notes recorded in each case, as well as the annotation of personal names, place names and plant names. By adding the GND IDs to the personal names and place names, links are possible not only to the GND but also to other databases. All digitized material was provided with persistent identifiers down to the level of individual pages and published via the Bavarian Multimedia Server, the respective URNs linked to the recordings in Kalliope. In the cases of digitized volumes, the title recordings of the contained individual documents had to be linked to the corresponding individual page URNs; for all individually digitized documents, the URNs could be added to the title recordings in Kalliope via a message list. The texts of the transcriptions including annotations and GND-IDs are attached to the digitized documents on the Bavarian Multimedia Server at the level of the individual pages. From Kalliope, the metadata including URNs of the digitized material were uploaded to the German Digital Library and the Archive Portal-D, where they are also publicly accessible under a free license (CC-O). Digitizing the copyright-free documents and presenting them in publicly accessible portals thus not only secured the holdings and protected the originals, but also provided a new research space that meets the desire for research on direct sources.
