From biographical lexicon to scholarly edition: the question of sustainability of digital editions

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe paper deals with the issues of digital curation, including storage formats, presentation, and access rights, in the frame of the case-study of two projects on digitisation of written materials: the Scholarly digital editions of Slovenian literature and the Slovenian biographical lexicon. Three basic aspects of digital curation, including preservation, are discussed. The first aspect is the sustainability of our digital format, i.e. of our textencoding; where the international standards and best practices are used, particularly the TEI Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange as a self-documenting, transparent and widely adopted de-facto standard. The second aspect is the presentation and search over the materials, where the static HTML pages and the Fedora Commons repository with SoLR full-text search are used. The last aspect deals with the access rights to the materials: in what format and for whom, and under what conditions are the texts made available. The argument on maximum openness as is embodied in the Creative Commons a licence was adopted as most applicative solution for the presented digital editions.