DMGH (digital Monumenta Germaniae Historica)

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The digital Monumenta Germaniae Historica (dMGH) offer free online access to all MGH-editions published until 2000. The dMGH are a cooperative effort of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München (BSB) (Bavarian State Library), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (German Research Foundation).

Currently the web site consists of a preliminary application allowing access to the digitized images of the printed editions. Ultimately this version will be replaced by an application allowing access to the full texts via a search interface.

With this project the volumes of the MGH, which are usually kept as a non-lending collection within most libraries, will be accessible worldwide. The dMGH started on July 1, 2004 and will be continued after the expiration of the funding by the DFG. Newly published editions will be excluded from the dMGH for five years after their publication, during which time the volumes will be reserved exclusively for the book market ("moving wall" of five years).

The full texts complete with prefaces, notes, and indices will be prepared until 2010 in three phases:

  • 2004-2006: Diplomata and Epistolae
  • 2006-2008: Scriptores
  • 2008-2010: Antiquitates, Leges, other remaining series

The original plan of the MGH was to provide broad access to the works of the historians of the middle ages, which were seen as a part of the national cultural heritage. This perspective will be raised to a new level by the dMGH with the help of up-to-date technical means. As the MGH cover a broad variety of texts and as they are committed to the historical-critical method, they have developed many different ways of presenting texts during their 180 years of existence - unlike, for instance, the Migne editions, which were prepared in a comparatively short amount of time without the intention to produce critical texts. Consequently, it is of great importance to reproduce exactly the historically developed appearance of the MGH-editions within the dMGH and not just to offer ways to easily cite passages from the online texts so that they can be found in the printed books and vice versa. Thus the digital presentation will closely resemble the original printed editions


Source(s): Application solutions

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