The Institute of Cultural Studies and Hungarian Literature of the Debrecen University launched a program to digitise and present 18th and 19th century periodicals, the original version of which are often difficult to access in their completeness.
The journals and papers of the period that have been published in critical editions (Magyar Museum, Orpheus, Uránia) and in digital libraries (Uránia, Ujj bétsi Magyar Musa, Hadi és Más Nevezetes Történetek) will be collected and presented in the project’s homepage while the ultimate aim of the program is to digitally process all other periodicals of the era.
The Debrecen University Library as a partner in the project offers its traditionally used resourse, which all together will form a complex technical framework to fulfil the main objectives of the Institute.
The D-SPACE based University of Debrecen Electronic Archive (DEA) stores the picture files of the digitised pages in two ways. The basic organisational unit of the collection is that of a periodical issue, which has it own qDC metadata record with a linked pdf file containing all pages of the issue for the use of the general public and, on the other hand, all the original digitised files of the individual pages for archival purposes. As the digitised periodicals, sometimes even an issue are based on various original copies, we find it important to use watermarks on all pages to show the location of the original pages.
It is relatively difficult to navigate through the journal collection in the DEA. Though theoretically the pdf files, and based on them the DEA itself, offer a full-text search in the periodicals, the automatically created text files contain a lot of uncertainties because of the often blurred characters of the original. The other search option available is a browse against the title of the issue records. To override these constraints the second element of the service aims at enhancing the search possibilities offering all the options of an authority controlled library catalogue. Enhanced MARC article records are created and stored in a separate database dedicated to 18th and 19th century periodicals within the library’s ILS. The records beside the usual bibliographic data contain the personal and geographic names in the articles as subject headings thus aiming to create an increasing pool of the period’s names. The fact that the article level descriptions are created in an ILS with its authority control functions gives a considerable help in creating, correcting and managing the name database during and even after the basic cataloguing project.
The article records contain links to the appropriate page of the pdf file to provide an easy access from the database to the fulltext.
The third element of the service is a series of webpages, which provide browsable table of content pages to the periodicals. The pages are automatically created from the MARC records using only the most important data elements in them. On the other hand the items in the list contains links to the fulltext of the articles and to the full records in the database. The later links are important because they can be the starting point of related name and subject searches.
The framework of the system is already in use and is receiving the products of the digitisation and bibliographic description in progress. Though there is a lot to cover till the end of the program we hope the databases will contain enough material soon for the researchers and general public to use it.