Bolzano Digital Archive: 1st phase completed

At the end of last year, the first phase of the Bolzano Digital Archive was completed, consisting of the digitisation of more than 36,000 pages of Bernard Bolzano’s written estate conserved at the Literary Archive of the Memorial of National Literature (LA PNP) in Prague.

These include drafts of his works, his sermons (which he called edifying discourses), and his mathematical, philosophical and theological notebooks. But they also include his letters, lecture notes and a myriad of official documents, such as his university certificates, documents relating to his dismissal as professor of religious doctrine and the ecclesiastical trial he faced, and his will.

Fulfilling his wishes, after Bolzano’s death in 1848, his papers were given to those friends and disciples who could make good use of them and who could publish or complete the writings he left ready or in a fairly advanced state for publication.

It was his friend and disciple Michael Josef Fesl who, from his exile in Vienna, gradually gathered a large part of them and who, in his will, left all his possessions to the Museum of the Kingdom of Bohemia, including such papers from Bolzano, as a result of which they returned to Prague after his death in 1864.

Over time, what is nowadays the National Museum of the Czech Republic and, since 1964, the LA PNP, enlarged Bolzano’s written estate kept in their care to its current extent through donations, acquisitions and the recataloguing of manuscripts.

The digitisation of the written estate of this Bohemian polymath, who played a key role in the shaping of Czechia, has been made possible thanks to the joint work with the LA PNP. On behalf of PragMatika, Daniel, Petra, Jakub and Elías were responsible for:

reviewing and improving the inventory list prepared by Pavel Křivský and Marie Pavlíková (1981) and revised by Jaromír Loužil (2006);
creating the descriptive metadata using the ELZA software in accordance with the General International Standard Archival Description (ISAD(G)) and the standards established by the Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic through version 3.1 of the Basic Rules for Processing Archival Materials (č. j. MV-171396-1/AS-2022);

preparing the archival materials for digitisation, which was carried out in accordance with the recommended international standards for the digitisation of manuscripts;
checking the digitised materials and their pairing with the metadata together with staff of the LA PNP and correcting any errors that arose during the process;
transferring the data and metadata using SFTP;
verifying the final result and making additional backup copies.

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Bolzano’s written estate will be made available in open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.

The maintenance of this and all PragMatika’s data is to be handled by team members, while its long-term storage and security are guaranteed thanks to an agreement reached with the Czech Education and Scientific NETwork (CESNET).

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