Monasterium.net
Link: http://www.monasterium.net/ [22. 05. 2013]
Monasterium.net is a platform offering online access to a vast range of diplomatic sources from European archives. Starting out as a project restricted to the charters preserved in the archives of monasteries in Lower Austria in the early 2000s it has developed into a collaboration of public (state and municipal) and private (diocesan, monastic and other) archives from 13 Central European countries, bringing together charters from about 110 single archival collections.
Monasterium.net provides inhomogeneous information on currently c. 250.000 charters. The original goal (as long as the geographic horizon was focused on Lower Austria) was to provide a high-quality digital image along with a full-text edition of each single charter. The basis for the text was the digitization of the painstaking 19th century editions published within the series Fontes Rerum Austriacarum. The expansion of the project since 2006 has made it impossible to keep up these standards for each archival collection. In most cases, the user will find a good image of each charter (photos are taken in the archives by a specialist team from Monasterium; only very few archives do not permit the online publication of the images) and an HTML based text, ranging from very succinct abstracts as provided by (mostly 19th century) archival repertories to OCR digitized reliable full text editions. Only a small number of images lack any accompanying textual information. Most of the archival collections offer an introduction with a more or less detailed history of their holdings and a short bibliography. Besides the presentation of charters belonging to the actual archival fonds there is a separate section of virtual “collections” containing digitized editions of diplomatic sources that would cover more than one archive.
The material is not restricted to the Middle Ages but early modern charters are decidedly fewer in number. Linked to the website are several pdf-documents of publications referring to the project or to archival material made accessible by Monasterium.net.
Monasterium.net was founded as an initiative of Thomas Aigner, head of the diocesan archive of St. Pölten (Lower Austria), and has been online since the early 2000s,with major international additions in 2006/07. Today Monasterium.net is maintained and coordinated by the ICARus consortium (International Centre for Archival Research) and is supported by the European Union (Culture Program 2007-2013), the Austrian State Ministry for Education, Art and Culture, The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and a large number of local authorities contributing to the photography campaigns in their archives. The rights for the photos, however, remain with the archival holders. Monasterium.net is continually expanding its database.
Languages available with the website are Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Serbian, Slovenian, Slovak and Spanish for the main site with the project description and some of the navigation bars; contents (description of archival holdings, history of archival fonds, calendars and abstracts) only in the national languages as provided by the respective member archives and institutions.
All texts within the whole database can be scanned by a simple full text search (incl. truncations). Search options contain the restriction to single archival fonds, results may be sorted by date or relevance. Names and places are regularly given in the form of older printed editions and are generally not identified with their modern or a standardized form, so that searching for persons will require several turns with alternative spellings.
Registered users may share their expertise with the collaborative archive and participate in editing and commenting charters using an XML-based online template.
Monasterium.net is available on open access and for free, login is not necessary for not-registered users.
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