Slovenian Biographical Lexicon ? From a Digital Edition to an On ...

INFuture2009: “Digital Resources and Knowledge Sharing”
Key words: digital library, encyclopaedia, TEI-XML markup, document repository,
Fedora Commons, XSLT workflows, search, Lucene, SOLR
Introduction
The Slovenian Bibliographical Lexicon (SBL, 1925-1991) has been conceived
as a publication that was to give an accurate picture of Slovenia’s cultural life,
from its beginnings up to the contemporary time by including everybody who
participated in the cultural development, either of Slovenian origin, born on
Slovenian soil or influencing Slovenian cultural life.
This broad aim resulted in the proposed list of 2,335 names, mostly from the
fields of humanities and social sciences, proposed by the original editorial
board. In its long history, this list has been changed and expanded: at first due to
the need to include other disciplines and areas, such as the natural sciences, later
due to changes in perspective, especially the WW2, when participants in recent
had to be included and the focus has been shifted to include “increasing development
of natural sciences, modern technologies and their applications, as part
of the spiritual superstructure” (SBL, vol. 15, 1991). In spite of several eliminations
from the original list, the final publication in 1991 comprised as many as
5,031 biographical entries, with more than 5,100 persons covered. Since the
publication was published sequentially, it is important to consider that the criteria
for different published volumes have therefore varied significantly.
The second aim of the publication was to be both informative and exhaustive,
so much substantial information had to be included in rather short articles (with
several longer exceptions) and it has been decided that the data in the articles
had to be been checked against relevant historical materials and pre-existing
publications., e.g. biographical and other dates are always compared to dates in
registers and other primary documents, literary citations are compared with
originals, sources are cited at the end of the articles and the publication includes
an index of all person names that appear in the articles and a list of abbreviations.
As a result, SBL contains a surprising amount of high-quality information and
references and remains to this day a precious resource for encyclopaedic and
reference editions and research in the Slovenian humanities, social sciences and
history of the natural sciences. It had, however, two severe drawbacks: the
original edition has quickly become difficult to find and the information, once
published, has never been updated, so much care has to be taken to consider the
time of publication of each article. The present project of digitalization of SBL
has been started by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) and
the Scientific Research Centre of the SASA to make this precious resource
available again, this time in the form of a freely accessible on-line edition, and
has been based on previous similar projects (cf. Erjavec, Ogrin, 2005). We aim
to describe here the steps taken on the path from the original publication towards
a fully interactive, searchable and cross-indexed on-line edition. The first
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