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 >>>

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 >>>

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 >>>