A Multifunctional Historical Document Research System

In this talk, the key components of a multifunctional historical document research system are discussed. An ongoing project which aims at creating a representative corpus of documents that reflect the impact of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the period 1865-1945 forms the case study for the research system. The realisation of the system includes several working fields: the collection of literature assets, the choice of digitization software supporting German black letter fonts, the design and implementation of a database, the development of fuzzy techniques for searching on documents with a non-standard spelling, the preparation of a web-based communication interface, the implementation of communication, annotation and visualisation tools, and the design of a userfriendly system interface adapted for heterogeneous user group ranging from interested amateurs to experts. Furthermore, the literature archive should utilize library-oriented data standards for archival storage. The data flow and data formats of the discussed multifunctional historical document research system is depicted in Figure 1.