About us

 

The Topotheque – the collaborative online archive in local units

The Topotheque is the platform, on which local historically relevant material and knowledge, kept in private hands, is preserved, indexed and made visible online with the help of ordinary people.

topothek-1Local history contemporarily presented

The multifaceted history of a community requires a contemporary vessel for its expression: where the abundance of footage exceeds the frameworks of museums and local chronicles, where material, documents and knowledge is widely dispersed, the uniting functionality of a database is called-for. Continuously expandable, with search, linking and localization functions.

Digitally uniting the dispersed

The indexing and localization functions of the Topotheques help to virtually unite especially those historic materials that are kept in private holdings

The original material, as well as the right of its use exceeding presentation within Topotheque, remains in the hands of the material owners.

Material and knowledge: collecting regionally

Only regional forces are able to safeguard local history comprehensively and throughly.This is why the guiding principle of the Topotheques is to have the caretakers, the Topothequers (?), firmly anchored in their communities. It is they, who can ask regionally relevant questions because of their familiarity with local realities. Because of their local knowledge, they can disclose historic sources and expertly index and localize the entries.

For academics and lay persons: easy working

The administrational work of a Topotheque is as simple as possible: one entry corresponds to a single cell row. Yet, the entries comply with ISAD/G standards, so they can be implemented into ArchivNet of the Lower Austrian Regional Archives.