Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Neil Jefferies, who oversees the technical attributes of our union catalogue, will be presenting on the digital components of the Project next month at a conference entitled Digital Library: Digitising and Accessing Content (Slovakia, 22-24 September 2010). The event will bring together libraries from across Europe to share technologies, best practices, and emerging global standards in the field of large data sets and metadata preservation in the cultural and heritage sectors. Neil, who will also be delivering a keynote lecture at the conference, will be describing the catalogue’s innovative system architecture and its relationship to the Digital Asset Management System, which has been developed as a platform to support digital library projects within Oxford. Further details are available on the conference website.

The challenge of describing, storing, and linking biographical and prosopographical information about historical actors and communities within a network environment is one faced by all digital correspondence projects. Fortunately, a workshop on Persons – Data – Repositories designed to explore these questions in detail will take place at the Berlin-Brandenbury Academy of Sciences on 27-29 September 2010. Organised under the auspices of the DFG project Person Data Repository, the event will discuss the development of tools and processes for handling person data which will enable both the automated merging of information while preserving a diversity of methods, an approach which requires both ‘cooperative and decentralized concepts’ and ‘new perspectives on data usage’ (connected in intricate ways to legal questions). For further information, including registration details, please see the workshop webpage.