Collaborative European Digital Archival Infrastructure (CENDARI)

Work package 5: Archival Description, Freie Universität Berlin (FUB)

Work package leader: Prof. Dr. Oliver Janz

Project coordination and research: Dr. Anna Bohn (2012-2014), Dr. Jörg Lehmann (2015/16), Dr. Aleksandra Pawliczek (2012-2015) and Dr. Andrei Zamoiski (2014-2016)

Project duration: 01.02.2012-31.01.2016

Funding: European Commission (7th Framework Program for Research)

Address: Freie Universität Berlin, Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut,
Arbeitsbereich Prof. Dr. Oliver Janz, Koserstr. 20, D-14195 Berlin

For more information see: www.cendari.eu and Twitter.

The Collaborative European Digital Archival Infrastructure (CENDARI) aims at providing access to existing archives and resources in Europe for the study of medieval and modern European history. This is being done by developing a virtual research environment.

Two areas were selected to serve as case studies for the development: the history of the First World War and the history of the Middle Ages. Thus two groups of historians with different needs and concerns were brought together under the umbrella of CENDARI to address broader questions of history and identity as well as spatial and temporal contexts in Europe.

CENDARIs final product is a Virtual Research Environment consisting of the Note Taking Environment, the Archive Directory AtoM and a search functionality which allows for standard, faceted and semantic search. The Note Taking Environment will allow users to create and upload documents and to take notes. It also contains Archival Research Guides providing paradigmatic introductions into various subjects and a wide range of historical sources. The users can compile sources from the archival directory and comment on them as well as tag them, annotate their own and uploaded documents semantically and connect them with controlled vocabularies and ontologies, the latter manually as well as automatically through a multilingual Named Entity Recognition. Thus the users are able to put their compilation in order, to enhance their search for further material, to share their project with other users and to add entries to the Archival Directory themselves. Finally, the Note Taking Environment enables users to produce Archival Research Guides themselves.

The Virtual Research Enviroment developed by the project CENDARI was launched on January 14th, 2016 in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. (Webcast of Project Launch in Berlin 14/1/16)

Project information:

Lead institution: Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Partner Institutions:

Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MISANU), Serbia

University of Birmingham (UOB), United Kingdom

Kings College London (KCL), United Kingdom

Georg August Universität Göttingen, Germany

Národní knihovna National Library of the Czech Republic (NKP), Prague, Czech Republic

Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino / International Society for the Study of Medieval Latin Culture (SISMEL), Italy

Fondazione Ezio Francheschini (FEF), Italy

Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale (UNICAS), Italy

University of Stuttgart / Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart, Germany