Abstract - Urs Schoepflin, Simone Rieger
Urs Schoepflin, Simone Rieger
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science(click on the title to see the presentation slides)
"Scholarly Workbench for the Humanities - an open access research infrastructure of the Max Planck Society"
The availability of cultural heritage on the internet is still inadequate for scholarly needs. Based on an initiative from several Max Planck Institutes in the Humanities, ECHO - European Cultural Heritage Online, http://www.echo-project.eu - makes freely and openly available a wide scope of materials pertinent to cultural heritage covering 5.000 years of documented human history. At the same time, the repository offers appropriate open source tools to allow for scholarly work with these digitized resources and integrating sources, on-going research, and dissemination of results in a workbench for humanities’ scholars.
The current holdings summary of ECHO lists more than 560 source authors in 70 collections and several disciplines and thematic fields, 206,600 documents, 505,000 high resulution images of historical and cultural source documents and artefacts, over 240 film sequences of scientific source materials, and more than 57,500 full-text page transcriptions in several languages. The ECHO network includes more than 150 institutions from 24 countries worldwide as active knowledge weavers.
The Max Planck Digital Library is currently involved in generalizing elements of the ECHO infrastructure in a Scholarly Workbench as part of the eSciDoc Project of the German eScience Initiative.
