Andrej Boyadžiev
(Faculty of Slavic Studies
Sofia University, Bulgaria)
REPERTORIUM INITIATIVE. HISTORY AND PERSPECTIVES
Abstract. The last decade has witnessed systematic attempts to make access to European literary heritage easier by way of information technologies (IT). That part of the heritage which includes primary sources such as medieval manuscripts, archive documents and early printed books is an extremely demanding area of data processing, both because of the complexity of their content and because of the extensiveness of meta-data in their description, both of which have to find their adequate electronic form. If the concept of databases of descriptions or texts was prevalent before the 1990s, the method of description in the last decade was related to the application of the SGML and XML international standards. The initiative Repertorium of Old Bulgarian Literature by Computer Means (http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~repertorium) was born at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS) in 1993-1994. The guiding principle of this initiative is that the description should service the objectives of various specialists like philologists, historians, art critics or librarians and to feature the requisite detail in every single field. As a continuation and broadening of its efforts a Commission on Computer Processing of Medieval Manuscripts and Early Printed Books was established in the framework of the International Committee of Slavists.