This is my first post on the Day of DH. It´s 8 in the morning and I´m in my office on the 4th floor of the “Philosophikum” at Cologne University.

The office

I guess for most people working here, it´s quite early so I´m nearly alone. I always start work early (not always that early and not always in the office I share with my two wonderful collegues Dominik & Georg), but as the summer term starts today, it was a willful decision to do so. Everything will be crowded with freshmen. Gladly most of them don´t make it to the 4th floor. 🙂

I´m currently working on the “Bibliotheca legum regni Francorum manuscripta” (Bl) project. The Bl aims at presenting an overview of the legal knowledge that existed in the Carolingian period. All secular law texts (as for example the Lex Salica or the Theodosian Code) that were copied during that time are included. We provide descriptions of manuscripts (at the moment there are 273 short descriptions online) which contain the so called “leges“ and also try to gather a lot of contextualizing information to sum up the current state of research as complete as possible.

Books

My role in the project is the technical lead, which is actually quite funny since I´m not a very technical person and I´ve hardly any knowledge about “real” programming. But so what! So far we´ve made it. Our WordPress CMS runs without any problems, we found a way to do the XSL transformations within the CMS, included different browsing accesses to the descriptions and also full-text and faceted search. A first user test was run in Jan/Feb this year and the feedback was surprisingly positive. Of course there are still a lot of bugs, but since the Bl has not been officially launched, I´m quite comfortable with that.

Today I attempt to work on the indices for people, places and repositories. Thanks to my colleague Dominik, most places already have TGN numbers, coordinates and/or other means of identification. Many entries in the list of persons still lack information on VIAF IDs or links to the respective wikipedia articles (yes, we link to wikipedia and we like it!). So I´m going to start with this. The list of repositories is nearly finished, but there are still some presentation issues. I never would have thought that it´s so difficult to find websites, contact data etc. for all the repositories that still exist.  Some of them are so crappy!

My second task is working on the different ways of presenting the manuscript. They can be found on a table containing the most important information on the Ms. (finished), a list sorted by shelfmark (finished), a list sorted by date of origin (to be done, – a timeline would also be wonderful), one sorted by place of origin (to be done, – with a nice map) and one according to the leges contained (work-in-progress).

So enough for know. I have to work!