About
The current inventory is based on an offline database of the correspondence archive of Helmuth Plessner. In a project running from 2023-2024, a project team checked, cleaned, enriched and converted the data into a suitable format for the selected online collection management system, Omeka S.
The collection management system currently holds around 13.000 records with the characteristic descriptions (metadata) of letters to and from Helmuth Plessner. The records also contain links to other online sources that hold additional information on the metadata, such as works related to the correspondents in the archive.
The most basic level of description of the letters in Omeka S is the item. Items are part of a collection, in which all items are described in a standardized manner. The items in the Plessner archive are described according to the ontologies Schema.org and Dublin Core. This means that for each item, uniform metadata fields are filled, such as the ‘title’, ‘sender’, ‘recipient’, ‘location of creation’ and ‘date of creation’ of each letter. By standardizing the description of these fields with widely used ontologies, the information can be processed by scholars as well as by computer algorithms, supporting easier connections within the collection as well as to other related collections.
The metadata themselves have also been standardized; each person, organization and location has for example been mapped to online thesauri. These are online databases that allow unambiguous linking of a metadata entry via a persistent link called a URI, independent of spelling variants or language variations.
Persons and organizations (‘senders’, ‘recipients’ and sometimes ‘about’) are linked to a VIAF URI. This ensures that all variants of a name (for example ‘H. Plessner’ and ‘Helmuth Plessner’) are connected to the same online instance of a person. VIAF also functions as a ‘node’ for links to other online sources on a person, such as Wikipedia and various library authority files.
Locations are linked to Geonames; this allows for showing the location on a map and pointing to the exact coordinates of this location.
The materiality of the letters (‘typewritten’, ‘written’, ‘copy’, ‘printed’) is linked to the Art and Architecture Thesaurus.
Because of the copyright on the Plessner archive, digital scans of the letters cannot be incorporated in this collection at the moment. If you are interested in the content of the letters, please make an appointment at the department of Special Collections at the University of Groningen Library. The Special Collections department is open every working day between 9:00 and 17:00 CET.
The University of Groningen Library’s future plans for the platform include adding other collections. We will make collections available with digitized materials as well, in order to provide even more options to researchers and other interested parties to discover the library's digital heritage.
If you spot any errors in the data, please contact us at bijzonderecollecties-bibliotheek@rug.nl.
To download the entire dataset as JSON-LD, click here.