RICERCA ITALIANA     

BIA-Net: On-line Access to the Bibliotheca Iuris Antiqui

Università degli Studi di Perugia

Abstract

This Project will make it possible to realise a digital on-line library for the historical-juridical community, based on a specialist digital collection, which has today become the most widespread instrument of information among scholars of Roman and ancient law (BIA), enriched with the particular services typical of on-line dissemination. The digital library will provide more functions than a traditional library or a digital collection on CD-ROM, such as the possibility to implement an interface for advanced services, searches in connected resources, virtual spaces for users and other customised functions. After the initial phase in which specialists in the various disciplines and scholars of Roman law will work in close contact with each other in selecting and structuring the digital collection, the project will be articulated in two sub-groups: the first of these will consist of the preparation of a philologically correct digital edition of the sources and in the integration of the reference bibliography; the second will deal with the analysis of the search functions and implementation of the specialist search engine. <<<

Principal Investigator

Nicola Palazzolo Università degli Studi di PERUGIA

Research Objectives

The project starts from the experience acquired over the years and the success among specialists of the two products of the activity of the research group that promoted the project (Bibliotheca Iuris Antqui). The integrated information system on ancient law – CD-ROM, Second edition, Catania, 2002; BD-Rom, Electronic archives of romanistic literature. CD-ROM Vol. I, Catania 2004; Vol. II, Catania 2006) the research group again proposes to make the entire scientific romanistic patrimony accessible on line, with the well-known difficulties in updating that this type of support involves. The material has already been digitalised and has heretofore been accessible only on CD-ROM.
It is a well-known fact that Bibliotheca Iuris Antiqui has a dual limit: a) on one hand the fact that the work of philological of the source text, which requires great accuracy and precision, obviously proceeds very slowly and is not sufficient to provide scholars with a complete patrimony of information equal to the one provided by the best hard copy editions: even the “restored” sources still lack the entire critical apparatus (notes, hypotheses of reconstruction, manuscript variants) which is irremissible today for any serious scholar; additionally, the attempts to memorise the critical apparatus of the Digest and Code, in the form of images of the relative pages, and then to connect them with hypermedia technologies to the digital text, have not produced great results, especially considering that such an apparatus would occupy an enormous memory, incompatible with the capacity of present-day CD-ROMs; b) on the other hand, the fact that the bibliographical updating would have to be performed very rapidly in order to be truly effective (at least annually), which is not compatible with the time necessary to produce a new CD ROM in its complete updated form and with all of its parts. Additionally, the possibility today of having the electronic text of more recent writings, of articles published by the same authors, would require the entry – where possible – in the OPERA archive of the entire text of the articles of doctrine, which is still impossible due to the size of the current CD-ROMs.
For these reasons, the research group considered it opportune to start a process that may lead to the placement on line of the entire body of the works produced (the three BIA archives, as well as the more recent BD-Rom), pursuing the interoperability of the data, through the adoption of standard formats and the availability of advanced access to resources, through the use of open (non-proprietary) information technology protocols for on-line searches. Additionally, the availability of the on-line archives will make it possible to implement advanced functions, such as the integration with search engines and digital resource registries, for an advancement of the instruments made available to researchers. This will be possible with the involvement of new competencies, which are necessary for the realisation of this undertaking. <<<

First Results

Understandably, there are high expectations in the romanistic scientific community for the updating and completion of the two works conceived and realised by the research group presenting this project today (BIA and BD-Rom). The success of these products, which are now considered indispensable instruments for access to the sources of bibliographical information, encourages the researchers to consider that even a simple updating and progressive improvement of existing products would be greeted with great enthusiasm. But this is not the research proposed. In fact, the project goes far beyond this objective. It is rather a question of using the most recent experiences in digital libraries and on-line search engines to the best advantage to provoke a leap forward in quality in terms of the experiences realised to date, which even the Romanists who are most attentive to technological innovation are beginning to feel as a necessity that it is important to make a commitment to: namely, to move from the optical support (CD-ROM or DVD) to direct on line access, with all of the advantages in terms of the ease of acquisition and importation of materials, of integration and navigation among different archives, the ease of updating and maintenance of the system.
The objective, of course, is quite ambitious, both because new technologies are being applied to an entire complex of data (sources, bibliographies, search instruments) which have heretofore been treated within the ambit of closed proprietary systems, both because this forces them to deal with problems, event theoretical ones, which are absolutely new for Romanists, but also for digital library experts, such as the problems relative to the identification of document type, textual and bibliographical specifications, according to which special Document Type Descriptions (DTD) can be built, which identify the document in question in an unequivocal manner.
This part of the research, obviously, goes well beyond the product to be realised (BIA-Net), because as it occurred for many well-known types of documents: consider the DTD of the legislative acts produced by the project “Norms on-line” of the Ministry of Justice – the DTD of the Roman juridical resources produced within the ambit of this project would become, in the absence of similar initiatives, a de facto standard (but with a great deal of scientific prestige) which would impose among the numerous initiatives even in our studies, of digitalisation of vast documentary patrimonies. Unfortunately, however, these initiatives develop without an adequate theoretical substrate and, moreover, outside of all recognised international standards, thus remaining isolated and unusable by the general body of interested scholars.
The possibility of commercial exploitation of the results of the research is also part of the theoretical research, starting from protection of copyrights for electronic commerce. In the opinion of the research group, concerning the sources, it is necessary to separate (and with on-line search technologies this is possible) the consultation of the text of the sources, in a philologically correct and dependable version, which would always be possible to access free of charge, and the utilisation of search instruments on the sources, to obtain concordances, investigations of the lexical elements, or in any case advanced searches, for which it would be possible to envision paid access managed by an external distributor. The same thing could be said for the bibliographical archives, distinguishing between access to the records of the data bank and access to the full texts and bibliographical works. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

The applications of information technology with respect to Roman law have been very meaningful and variegated in recent years, especially in Italy, and have favoured important renewal of the auxiliary means of romanistic investigation, both where access to the bibliographical information is concerned, as well as the procurement of ancient sources relative to a specific subject.
Concerning the source texts, scholars may avail themselves today of a variety of information systems, where the entire text of the sources of knowledge are stored (direct and indirect, technical and atechnical). In these cases we commonly speak of “full-text” archives. Concerning the bibliography, on the other hand, we are almost always dealing with reference databases, in which the entire text of the bibliographical works cannot be found, but only the bibliographic details (author, title, year, publishing house and number of pages). Frequently a brief summary of the work (abstract) is included, or the summary, when dealing with monographic works or collections of writings. Only in sporadic cases and generally only for the most ancient works, which are still consulted frequently, the entire edition of several important works have recently begun to be digitalised, generally as stereotype images and more rarely in full text files. Finally, effective and advanced research instruments have been perfected, both from the point of view of information technology and the documentary point of view, for the retrieval of sources and the bibliography.
These considerations are valid first of all for what is probably the most important and widespread bibliographical text archive for the study of Roman Law, namely the 2000 edition of the Bibliotheca Iuris Antiqui (BIA). With its three integrated archives (FONTES, OPERA, THESAURUS) it permits Romanists not only to gain rapid and complete access to the complex of ancient juridical resources and to the entire bibliography related to it, but also the possibility – through an opportune cross referencing of data – to carry our targeted research on individual aspects and specific subjects.
More in particular, the juridical sources archive (FONTES) is an electronic text, adequately structured in fields, which facilitates the retrieval of information through various search keys managed by an efficient information retrieval program. It is a documentary fund of considerable size (approximately 14 million characters), containing most of the Roman juridical sources of manuscript tradition, which was acquired and transferred into the information retrieval program utilised for the BIA. For the second edition of the BIA (2002), a thorough activity of “philological restoration” was initiated, which led to the complete revision of the electronic text of the Justinian Digest, which has now been made to conform with the editio minor by Mommsen-Krüger (more precisely, the editio stereotypa XII, Berolini 1911). The work of restoration continued with the complete revision of the Justinian Code, which was harmonised with the stereotypa X edition, Berolini 1929, by Paul Krüger, with the “philological restoration” of the juridical sources of epigraphic and papyrological origin taken from the first volume of the FIRA, which were already present in the Fontes archive of the BIA; and with the acquisition of the Justinian Novellae collection, which was found in an older electronic format dating from the Seventies and was converted, following philological restoration, to a format compatible with new information retrieval programs. Concerning another aspect, the connected research units provided for the digitalisation of a large number of juridical sources on epigraphic supports (largely published in the more well-known FIRA collection of vol. 1, although much of it is quite dated).
Concerning the bibliography, the “OPERA” archive of the Bibliotheca Iuris Antiqui (BIA) is again the most recent and largest bibliographical data bank realised to date. It is a reference database that contains bibliographical references to over 40,000 works, including monographies, collections of writings, magazines and articles dealing with Roman and ancient law, partially taken from specialised bibliographical collections and largely memorised manually. The 2000 edition covers the period from 1940 to 1998. The monographic volumes, collections of writings and yearly collections of the most important magazines in the sector, contained in the bibliographical archive, generally show a complete summary. For the articles, on the other hand, an abstract is shown, when it was already included in the original source. The bibliographical description of the document is set forth according to the criteria used in current bibliographical collections. For writings contained in collections or periodicals, the title of the collection or periodical is identified in abbreviated form, if not actually encoded. The description of the work is set forth in the original language of the individual documents. In the case of languages that have characters other than the Latin ones, the relative words are transliterated with Latin characters.
On another level, but again in relation to the historical-juridical scientific production, there are the realisations that are not limited to providing the bibliographical details of each work noted, but which contain the entire text in digital form. Among the most meaningful initiatives in this direction is the one begun in 1998, again by the BIA research group, of re-publishing of the most important works of romanistic literature in a facsimile digitalised version on CD-Rom (BD-Rom – Romanistic Digital Library). The first CD-ROM, published in 2004, contains the most important manuals and treatises on Roman public law published between 1839 and 190, for a total of about 16,000 pages in facsimile format. The second CD-ROM, which was published during the last few months, contains the manuals and general studies on the sources. A series of additional functions were set up by the research group that created the project, making the work quite different from other similar initiatives. There are two particularly innovative instruments: a) the full text indexes of the individual works, which can therefore be consulted word by word and indexed through one or more describers per subject and one or more classification codes; b) the examination cards, which contain the index of the sources cited on each page.
Finally the Thesaurus, built especially for the BIA, is the instrument that permits the two archives of the sources and literature to interact, enormously increasing the potential for research. This is a documentary instrument of considerably wide-scope, which contains the conceptual scheme that the classification codes are based on, relative to the various subjects of Roman and ancient law and, within this framework, the verbal describers (about 8,000 Latin or Latinised terms) for the purpose of searches by subject.
Additionally, the mass digitalisation programs, especially those started by the European Union and the Open Access institutional deposits have made a quantity of sources and reference works available, which it is useful to integrate with the BIA archive, to valorise the data collected and utilise the existing resources to the best possible advantage. <<<