A Digital-first Collaborative Catalogue of Manuscripts

Identification of requirements

To start with the right foot, one should be quite clear from the outset about the desired final output. In most cases, this will involve the requirements of the editors of the article or book and the structure of the entry for one manuscript. Typically, none of these requirements should prevent any of the following steps, that is to say, good solutions can be found to the excuse "the editor does not let me".

My suggestion: make a list or one, possibly complete, example of the input (XML) and output (your entry in the catalogue). This would ideally before the start of the project or as early in the project as possible.

Start from the output...

In the GitHub Make PDF repository (Beta Masaheft) you can find all the details of a customizable package to allow you producing a PDF output from XML records. It is the same used in the Catalogue of the manuscripts of Dayr as Suryan.

The package is easily customizable with the settings file, not only for the layout features, but also for the parts, their order, and the contents. The main functionalities are documented here and the typesetting is done in Oxygen XML Editor using XSL-FO and Apache FOP.

To use it, please fork (not branch) the repository to your own GitHub account. If you open that package in Oxygen, open driver.xml and click play, the package will use BM to fetch resources from the research environment and print your book.

Encode, print, check, report, correct, repeat

You might work with manuscripts already encoded in BM or with new descriptions you carried out for your project. In the last case, consider as a first step having a unified type of information, the TEI used by the project. Thus describing the manuscripts and linking the images and the text in the research environment will allow you to benefit from the existing information. Catalogue descriptions can be as long or short as desired.

Add the manuscripts , indexes will update at every run, add new information, change it, simply encode following these guidelines and look at the output. Chances are that the output will not look as you want. If it is not one of the customizable settings you can either try to read the Xquery or simply ask somebody who knows to help you. If you keep your project in GitHub help will come as easy as a commit to your repository.

The clearer you explain what the source is and what the output is that you expect, the easier the fix.

Deposit Your Dataset

Working with the data in the research environment will provide you with stable citable references for each committed and merged version of your files. But what about the entire group of resources you have used? To make the set really reproducible and your collected resources citable as a set, you may deposit them in Zenodo or another similar repository.

Copyright of remixed content

As every single page of our website states, as well as each file in the Beta maṣāḥǝft dataset, the copyright of the data is of the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Hamburg, Hiob-Ludolf-Zentrum für Äthiopistik. Sharing and remixing are permitted under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Therefore books created remixing and reusing this data (catalogues, editions, etc.) should have the same copyright, or a formulation equally or more permissive adequately negotiated with the publisher.

Publication products generated from BM data must respect this copyright and should contain appropriate attribution to all contributors. The above PDF producing script does some of this, not all that can be done! Once all is ok and the book/article is ready, the licensing of the data, with the agreement of the above copyright owners, can be upgraded for commercial use as well, so that the publisher can print and sell (CC-BY-SA-NC —> CC-BY-SA). This is possible and positive, as it allows even more reuse. A deposit of the source data as described above can be made and a DOI of the data deposit added to the book content. Copyright of the book/article, product of the remix of data, can be silently or formally passed to the editor. The statement in the book, in respect to the original copyright should state (C) editor name… CC-BY-SA, or an equally allowing licence as the data on which it is based requires. Editors can commercialise it and sell the book respecting this copyright. As soon as possible and following agreement with the editor, the data can additionally be made Open Access. The DOI of the open access book is added to the deposit of the data with the proper relation so that the two DOIs know about each other. This example workflow yields the following distinct products, each of which is distinctly and separately citable, adding to each other over time:

1. publication of the source data NC until publication CC-BY-SA-NC (C) Akademie+HLCEES + Open Access and versioned in GitHub
2. publication of the source data after publication CC-BY-SA (C) Akademie+HLCEES + Open Access and versioned in GitHub
3. HTML versions of the data throughout CC-BY-SA-NC (C) Akademie+HLCEES + Openly available, with independently generated Permanent Identifiers for reference and stable URIs for data relations.
4. Several additional data formats remixes with CC-BY-SA-NC (C) Akademie+HLCEES + Openly available
5. publication of the dataset for the publication CC-BY-SA (C) Akademie+HLCEES + Open Access for the dataset with DOI
6. the print publication CC-BY-SA (C) Editor
7. the digital publication CC-BY-SA (C) Editor + Open Access for book with DOI.
8. An additional versions of the DOI of the deposit of the data, once this is updated with relation to the DOI of the book.