How to Face the Crisis of Legitimacy: The Transfer and Further Development of Methods of Access from Printed to Digital/Digitised Editions

All media provide media specific methods of access to information and therefore media change affects also these methods of access. But the change of media and hence access methods also raises the question of legitimacy of doing this, in terms of scholarly working as well as in terms of justification in the face of the funding general public financing research either directly by the government or indirectly by research funding organisations which are financed by taxes. The digitalization of a formerly printed critical edition is a case of media change. This paper will shortly describe the full text search as an example of methods of access added by the transformation of classical print editions into a digital Web site, and how far this method accommodates the user habits of the broader, even non-scholarly public. Using the example of APW digital, a full text digitalization of a cutting edge printed edition, online since July 2014, three possibilities to accommodate the users’ expectations and thus to gain legitimacy for the digitalization project will be presented and discussed: the creation of new introductory material besides the original texts, the using of full text search and the access by metadata. 1 Acta Pacis Westphalicae (APW): critical print and online edition The Congress of Westphalia which ended the Thirty Years War is a key moment in European history. It is considered a model of modern peace negotiations. There had never been such a major and significant secular diplomatic meeting before (Lanzinner 2013, 12). From 1643 to 1649 it provided diplomatic communication in an unprecedented way. It produced a broad variety of textual sources (letters, minutes, diaries and treaties) written in French, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, Latin and German which reflect the congress' activities. These materials have been edited in the series Acta Pacis Westphalicae (APW) since the 1960s (APW digital: Über die Acta Pacis Westphalicae). To increase the accessibility of the texts it has been decided to establish a digital edition in addition to the print version of the APW. For the transformation of the print into a digital edition, all volumes published in the APW series before 2008 (around 28,000 pages of text written in German, French, Swedish, Latin and Italian) were digitised by OCR. In July 2014 the digital edition of the APW materials went online (APW digital). This change of media raises questions about legitimacy, questions which result from the characteristics of editions in general and those of print editions in particular and which have not been commented yet. Up to now discussions focussed mostly on the technical possibilities and limits of digital publications in itself, e.g. their digital