Hans-Werner BARTZ / Aline DEICKE / Anna NEOVESKY
(Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz, Germany)
Abstract:
Since 1966, the project „Prähistorische Bronzefunde“ (PBF) has been collecting and publishing copper, bronze and iron finds dating from 3 000 to 500 BC and originating from the area of Middle Europe and its peripheral, mainly eastern regions. Culminating in more than 180 publications with over 140.000 objects and including countless figures and maps, any attempt at digitizing this wealth of data requires careful planning and the development of semi-automated workflows to process text and images.
PBF Online aims to provide comprehensive access to the unique material collected over almost 60 decades in the project “Prähistorische Bronzefunde” and a useful research tool for scholars of the Bronze and Iron Age all over the world.
As a first step, the text is digitized via double-keying. The resulting file is further structured with TUSTEP, a tool for rule-based text manipulation, which generates an XML-file to be imported into a MySQL-database. This database is the core of a web-frontend which enables the user to carry out comprehensive searches across all books, differentiating queries by categories such as place, type of find, context of find or associated finds. The website also contains information about the project itself as well as downloadable copies of the printed text.
Supporting the philosophy of OpenData, the data will be published under a Creative Commons-License. For this purpose all text and images will be available in standardized formats through a REST-interface.
A prototype presenting text and images of five books comprising of finds from the area of Lower Saxony will be available online shortly. Further data will be added successively.
Keywords: Online Edition; Bronze Age; Find Repository