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Professionally edited open access online encyclopaedias enable a systemic and reliable orientation within the ever-increasing amount of data and information on the Internet. Providing access to scientifically verified information, they represent an important part of the research and didactic infrastructure. This paper demonstrates the activities of Croatia’s Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography aimed at exploring the new encyclopaedic concept in the digital age. The Institute’s digital transformation is shown, which involves the digitisation and online publishing of archival editions, publishing of the permanently updated online general encyclopaedia, and the transformation of specialised encyclopedias to the encyclopaedic portals. Encyclopaedic portals could represent a new concept of encyclopaedias in the digital realm by serving as platforms for data networking and sharing, a sort of ‘junction points’ that connect diverse digital content on a specific topic. Institute’s publicly available repository of encyclopaedic knowledge enables the linking to the digital data and collections of other research and cultural institutions; therefore the collaborative projects aimed at reinforcing digital research and cultural infrastructure will be described. Thanks to the properties of the digital media and increasing connectivity, a closer collaboration Towards a New Concept of Open Access Online Encyclopaedia : A Case Study from... between professionally edited online encyclopaedias across Europe (and beyond) is enabled. This paper elaborates a range of initiatives seeking to build connections across individual European and North American national encyclopaedias, focusing on the role that Croatian encyclopaedistics plays in this endeavour.

International audience; The National Library Ivan Vazov in Plovdiv is the second largest library in Bulgaria. It serves asthe second national legal depository of Bulgarian printed works. In addition, it has contributedsignificantly to the preservation and the digital accessibility of the national cultural andhistorical heritage. This article offers an overview of the library’s history and currentdevelopments in the field of automation and digitization.

The rapid development of new digital tools and infrastructures in recent years and their application to a variety of disciplines has transformed how we store, access and retrieve information available to us. This has also shaped the ways how knowledge in a diverse cultural context is presented, used and re-used. The exploreAT! project builds upon not only Austrian, but also European cultural identity from the aspect of language, in particular dialects. Unlike standard languages, dialects are in times of globalization under considerable threat of diminishing, and this ultimately poses a risk to the intangible record that is language and through which a history of tangible culture is expressed. In this paper we elaborate on the possibilities digital means and the infrastructure and services of the EGI-Engage project offer in revealing and giving access to unique traditional cultural knowledge contained in a non-standard language resource on the example of the Bavarian dialects in Austria (DBÖ). Digital tools and services allow our heterogeneous corpus of data to be virtually exploited and preserved. The flexibility of the internet allow these data to become not only visible, but searchable and extractable. Through the digitization efforts, and use of European infrastructures the hidden cultural narratives within the data can be uncovered, enriched and shared for the benefit of knowledge society.

This article tackles the issue of integrating heterogeneous archival sources in one single data repository, namely the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal, whose aim is to support Holocaust research by providing online access to information about dispersed sources relating to the Holocaust (http://portal.ehri-project.eu). In this case, the problem at hand is to combine data coming from a network of archives in order to create an interoperable data space which can be used to search for, retrieve and disseminate content in the context of archival-based research. The scholarly purpose has specific consequences on our task. It assumes that the information made available to the researcher is as close as possible to the originating source in order to guarantee that the ensuing analysis can be deemed reliable. In the EHRI network of archives, as already observed in the case of the EU Cendari project, one cannot but face heterogeneity. The EHRI portal brings together descriptions from more than 1900 institutions. Each archive comes with a whole range of idiosyncrasies corresponding to the way it has been set up and evolved over time. Cataloging practices may also differ. Even the degree of digitization may range from the absence of a digital catalogue to the provision of a full-fledged online catalogue with all the necessary APIs for anyone to query and extract content. There is indeed a contrast here with the global endeavour at the international level to develop and promote standards for the description of archival content as a whole. Nonetheless, in a project like EHRI, standards should play a central role. They are necessary for many tasks related to the integration and exploitation of the aggregated content, namely: ● Being able to compare the content of the various sources, thus being able to develop quality-checking processes; ● Defining of an integrated repository infrastructure where the content of the various archival sources can be reliably hosted; ● Querying and re-using content in a seamless way; ● Deploying tools that have been developed independently of the specificities of the information sources, for instance in order to visualise or mine the resulting pool of information. The central aspect of the work described in this paper is the assessment of the role of the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) standard as the basis for achieving the tasks described above. We have worked out how we could develop a real strategy of defining specific customization of EAD that could be used at various stages of the process of integrating heterogeneous sources. While doing so, we have developed a methodology based on a specification and customization method inspired from the extensive experience of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) community. In the TEI framework, as we show in section 1, one has the possibility to model specific subsets or extensions of the TEI guidelines while maintaining both the technical (XML schemas) and editorial (documentation) content within a single framework. This work has led us quite far in anticipating that the method we have developed may be of a wider interest within similar environments, but also, as we believe, for the future maintenance of the EAD standard. Finally this work, successfully tested and implemented in the framework of EHRI [Riondet 2017], can be seen as part of the wider endeavour of European research infrastructures in the humanities such as CLARIN and DARIAH to provide support for researchers to integrate the use of standards in their scholarly practices. This is the reason why the general workflow studied here has been introduced as a use case in the umbrella infrastructure project PARTHENOS which aims, among other things, at disseminating information and resources about methodological and technical standards in the humanities.

In the light of new digital production and dissemination practices, the scholarly publishing system has seen significant and also disruptive changes, especially in STM (science, technology and medicine) and with regard to the predominant format “journal article.” The digital transformation also holds true for those disciplines that continue to rely on the scholarly monograph as a publication format and means for reputation building, namely the Humanities and the Social Sciences with a qualitative approach (HSS). In our paper we analyse the reasons why the monograph has not yet reached its full potential in the digital paradigm, especially in the uptake of Open Access and innovative publishing options. We highlight some of the principal underlying factors for this, and suggest how especially practices, now more widespread in HSS but arising from the Digital Humanities, could play a role in moving forward the rich digitality of the scholarly monograph. peerReviewed

In the Republic of Serbia the idea that the digitization of cultural heritage could be used to popularize and utilize modern technologies in education was first realized in 2012. One of the results of this project was a user study. In this paper we indicate some of project’s fragments and present some of the results of the conducted research.