Speaker
Joris Colla (KU Leuven)
Abstract
ODIS is a contextual and relational database on the history of civil society. It is used by a growing number of heritage and research institutions in Flanders and Brussels and aims to stimulate cross-fertilization between the custodians of cultural heritage collections (mainly heritage librarians and archivists) and researchers. The database was set up in 2000-2003 thanks to a grant of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO). It is administered by ODIS asbl, in which the universities of Antwerp (UA), Brussels (VUB), Ghent (UGent) and Leuven (KU Leuven) are represented. Its daily management is ensured by KADOC, the Documentation and Research Centre on Religion, Culture and Society of KU Leuven.
In the first part of this contribution, I will focus on the added value of a joint authority database for the contextual disclosure of analog and digital heritage collections. The members of the ODIS partnership use the system to offer both basic information on their documentary heritage (archives, periodical publications) and elaborate data sets on organizations, persons, families, buildings and events related to that heritage, with (deep)links to and from primary catalogs and digital repositories. By means of the database’s search functions and tools, scholars can analyze its content, which sometimes replaces the consultation of physical heritage collections. But they can also use ODIS to store, pool, validate, publish and/or analyze their own data sets. By doing so, they preserve them from oblivion and guarantee the reproducibility of their research. At the same time, they enrich the data series developed by heritage organizations. The use of ODIS by researchers in the field of book history is a telling example.
A second part of my contribution will be devoted to the current in-depth modernization of ODIS (2022-2027), which can be executed thanks to a research infrastructure grant of FWO and with LIBIS-KU Leuven as technical partner. At the core of the project is the development of a new triple store database (Virtuoso) and of a new OPAC. I will in particular highlight the following features of the renewal project:
- The development of new ways to query, analyze and visualize data sets (such as network visualization and geographical visualization), allowing the heritage institutions using ODIS to respond to the challenges of digital humanities in a more effective way.
- The development of an interoperability and discovery layer, offering more and better connections with other catalogs, research instruments, platforms and Linked Open Data resources. This is the cornerstone of a durable open access policy and will facilitate the semantic enrichment of the ODIS content through interconnections with complementary data sets.
- The development of ODIS into a tool that is suited for citizen science projects, with the crowdsourcing project ‘Chapels in Flanders’ (using an Omeka S website related to ODIS) as a challenging testcase.