Archive Net for Cooperative Historical Research based on Sources
(ANCHORS)
A considerable effort is currently devoted and/or planned to the acquisition in computer readable form of large amounts of valuable paper documents; at the same time intellectual work produces an increasing number of papers, books, reports explicitly related with the first ones. But the large amount of the material itself, the lack of a suitable organization of it, its dispersion, the variety of representation formats and of the systems managing their storage, all constitute severe barriers to their effective use. ANCHORS project aims directly at enabling a number of university libraries and archival institutions involved with the medieval and modern history of Europe, to provide guided access, by telematic means, to their own specialized documentary resources, including source documents and research production. A related objective is to support professional people and researchers in the above institutions in applying advanced historical methodologies to the organization of document bases and the performing of critical and investigation work. More in the large, the project aims at experimenting standards, techniques and tools for : a) the creation and organization of computer readable corpora of inter-related documents, b) the production of added value documents (e.g. critical studies, doctorate theses), c) the exchange of such documents between cooperating institutions and their accessibility to the research community through established international networks. The integration in the frame of the policies of national library systems will also be pursued. In the work outlined here below, utmost exploitation will be pursued of already available software tools (both commercial and free domain) and computation / communication infrastructures. Also, as a rule, work needed for electronic acquisition of large amounts of documents (mainly scanning and text recognition) will be considered as an external contribution to the project. The work proposed will include : - the acquisition of the methodological results from an ongoing project in historical computing; - the development of a WWW services for the easy access, on the Internet, to a wide base of electronic archives and to a set of tools supporting source-oriented analysis; - the evaluation of different formats and languages used / proposed for standardizing the repre-sentation of traditional documents and hypermedia, and protocols for their exchange; - the proposal of some extensions to the WWW client-server architecture especially for the authoring of distributed virtual archives and for the exchange of them on largely available communication means; - the development of a demonstrator of the above architecture, including the associated viewing and authoring tools, which will allow to experiment research work based on the on-line integrated access to bases of documents and to bibliographical catalogs; - the connection to a national library system (such as would be in Italy the SBN Union catalogue) to access its bibliographical records; - the study for extending the facilities provided by national library services with accessibility of full content document bases. 
Administrative and financial data overview:
Project title Archive Net for Cooperative Historical Research based on Sources
ANCHORS
Duration of proposed project (months) 24
Total effort of proposed project (man-months) 118
Total cost of proposed project ECU 449 600


Participant List
Ref Participant full name Participant short name Country
C       LINK srl        LINK Italy
P1      Universita' di Roma-1 "La Sapienza", Biblioteca del Dipartimento di
Studi Storici dal Medioevo all' Eta' Contemporanea SMEC Italy
A1      Universidad de Salamanca, Departamento de Historia Medieval,
Moderna y Contemporanea DHIMUS Spain
A2      Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma, CED di Palazzo Altemps
SOPAR Italy
   P2      Karl-Franzens-Universit$t Graz, Forschungsinstitut fuer Historische
Grundwissenschaften FHG Austria
A3      Stadtarchiv Regensburg SARE Germany
A4      Dr. Fulvio Colombo (Codice Diplomatico Istriano) CDI Italy
A5      Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Institut fur
Realienkunde des Mittelalters und der fru:hen Neuzeit IREAL
Austria
P3      IBM-SEMEA SpA SEMEA Italy
Stefano Lariccia Dip. Studi Storici Laboratorio di Informatica Umanistica Fac. di Lettere Universita' di Roma "La Sapienza" Piazzale Aldo Moro 5 I-00185 Roma e-mail: lariccia@sci.uniroma1.it