Development of an infrastructure for the implementation of a thematic access in the German Archives Portal (Archivportal-D) using exemplary archival holdings concerning the “Weimar Republic”

• Applicants: Dr. Michael Hollmann; Professor Dr. Gerald Maier; Matthias Razum
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396707386

The goals of the second phase of this project are to optimize previous components developed on the basis of the exemplified thematic access “Weimarer Republik” within the first phase of the project, to secure them on a long term basis and to process them for following-up use cases. The German Archives´ Portal enables specific and research-orientated investigation within archival fonds and digitized material of archives at national level. The thematic access “Weimarer Republik” extends previous research options by user-friendly and generic features.Archival fonds digitized within the projects “Weimar – die erste deutsche Demokratie” (Bundesarchiv) and “Von der Monarchie zur Republik – Digitalisierung von Quellen des Landesarchivs zur Demokratiegeschichte“ (Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg) have been the basis for “Weimarer Republik” so far. Data of further archives will follow during the second project phase.The thematic access is based on enriching archival fonds with index-terms of different entity types out of a referenced vocabulary system. Hereby, connecting the terms with the Integrated Authority File (GND) enhances the integration of archival records into semantic web.To expand research possibilities within the thematic access, a new facet, entity typ “person”, will be made available during the second project phase. Subsequently, by means of this first completed thematic access, infrastructure and workflows which make it possible for research institutions and other archives to devise and maintain own thematic accesses will be established.For this purpose, templates for vocabulary systems and vocabulary of the different entity types will be developed and made available in addition to the publication of the referenced vocabulary system of “Weimarer Republik”. The thematic accesses in the German Archives´ Portal intend to become an integral research-relevant searchtool-offer for historical sciences, able to be established and filled as collaborative information hubs for different research-relevant topics by both archives and researchers.As a part of the new infrastructure, the indexing tool which has been created to enrich archival fonds will be opened for scientific communities and the public to enable collaborative indexing by users as part of a web 2.0-component. In this context, the generalization of the experimental work package of algorithmic indexing will also be prepared with regard to other thematic areas. Further result improvements of automatic indexing by means of algorithms will be approached.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)