ViRR

Aim
Today, much information about the law of the Holy Roman Empire ("Heiliges Römisches Reich Deutscher Nation") exists, but is available as multiple artefacts and distributed over several institutions and libraries. The aim of the "Virtueller Raum Reichsrecht" is to provide a digital collection and cooperative working environment for various legal artefacts of the period of the  Holy Roman Empire , based on the infrastructure of eSciDoc.

Summary
ViRR is a virtual research platform for the digital preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage content like images and texts from the period of the Holy Roman Empire. The basis of ViRR is a collection of 42 digitized works.

These scans are published open access and are enhanced with browsing and navigation functionalities. ViRR supports the users in the production of digital content for online presentation and collaboration. This process contains editing of metadata, enrichment of the content with structural information or, in future, enhancement of the collection with related resources such as annotations and transcriptions.

The vision of ViRR is to provide a scientific online workbench for researchers from different backgrounds, working together on the same resources to achieve new insights in their field of interest. For that it is sought to create a virtual environment where the, yet widely spread and loosely coupled, works of the Holy Roman Empire are collected and published.

Future Development
The development for the ViRR project is finished since end of 2010 the ideas and findings will run in the new project Digitisation Lifecycle.

Functionalities
A detailed description of all ViRR functionalities can be found on the functionalities page.

Research Context

 * Simple accessibility of the research materials via a web application.
 * Long-term archiving of research materials.
 * Persistent referencing of a collection and its content.
 * Improved visibility of the institute and its holdings.

Partners
ViRR (Virtueller Raum Reichsrecht) is a collaboration of the MPDL with the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History (MPIeR). The institute already has experiences with digital collections, see e.g their Digital Library.

The project is coordinated by Dr. Sigrid Amedick, head of the institutes library. The basic start content of 42 works, the physical as well as the digitized artefacts belong to the holdings of the institute.

Re-Use of ViRR
The ViRR solution enables to maintain collections of digitized artefacts, such as text corpora, digitized journals or drawings. It provides...
 * browsing functionalities based on user-defined table of contents (ToCs)
 * an editing interface for enriching the ToC with descriptive metadata and other structural elements, such as chapters, appendices or folders
 * import and export of data (e.g. METS)

Contact Friederike Kleinfercher Max Planck Digital Library

Support
For questions, proposals, comments...

please send a message to the [mailto:virr-support@gwdg.de ViRR Support].