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Would you like to participate in the scientific exploration of the documents? Please register in the Collaborative Archive and select a moderator to assist you. For more information, please read the text below:

The Monasterium Collaborative Archive  (MOM-CA) is a digital archive for medieval and early modern documents. Set out in 2002, MOM-CA has meanwhile acquired more than 500.000 scientifically indexed documents from approximately 60 archives in eight European countries. The collaborative online system EditMOM, specifically designed for MOM-CA, provides the ideal set-up for indexing and digitally editing large archives.

StAR_12990518_77_r01MOM-CA has fully committed itself to the idea of collaborative, scientific work: As a first step, each document is photographed and displayed online as a high-quality scan on MOM-CA. On this basis, every single source is indexed in full detail. All archival stock is semantically coded following the well-established XML Standard CEI (Charters Encoding Initiative), facilitating a targeted and complex search for information, which outmatches conventional full-text search by far.

In addition, documents can gradually be annotated with summaries and transcriptions by means of the web-based text editor and coding tool EditMOM. Descriptions of the condition of the document and the seal, as well as notes on mentioned persons or places complete the set of information. Furthermore, references and an overview of previous scientific processing will be given for the individual documents.

EditMOM follows the idea of Web 2.0, as basically any interested person can register as an “editor” in the system and thus actively participate in the in-depth editing and indexing of archival stock.

EditMOM provides a graphical surface easy to handle also for the technically less adept. A brief and plain online manual describes the functions of the program. As opposed to online knowledge pools such as Wikipedia, all information will undergo a strict quality check. Fourteen experts act as moderators, screening each processed document before making it accessible to the public. As per today, the team of moderators and editors includes some 150 professional historians, students and historically interested laymen in several European countries.

In today’s area of medieval source research, combining a digital archive of this size with a collaborative, web-based editing system is globally unique. MOM-CA and EditMOM so far offer unimagined insight into the history of Central European culture and up-to-date ways of scientific research.