About the project

On the 1st of January 2013 the German Literature Archive in Marbach launched the three-year project „Preserving German Net Literature And Making It Long-Term Available“.

The purpose of this project is to establish a corpus of relevant sources of German-language electronic literature developing since the 1990s. This type of literature uses the internet and its typical hyperlink structure not only as a form of publication, but also as a scope of design and object of aesthetic reflections. Software and hardware are of paramount importance to the creation and reception of electronic literature.

Aims

The basis of the corpus built during the project will consist of approximately 50 representative sources of electronic literature. Since the online resources are based on the structures of the internet and thus are fleeting we expect technical difficulties concerning the ingest to the permanent archive. The contemporary technical means are not sufficient to archive any source authentically. Thus, the systematic analysis and documentation of the environments in which the source was created, rendered and archived will be a considerable part of the project. The gained expertise will be of high value to future research projects dealing with the development of emulation strategies in long-term archiving.

Results & Access

The sources will be provided over the archiving platform of the German Literature Archive called “Literatur im Netz” as well as the OPAC Kallías which in addition offers the researcher a wide range of literary source documentation. The project will cover the steps selection, obtainment of permissions, standardized indexing, archiving and ingest to the permanent archive. Therefore the development of workflows will be necessary. To provide process transparency these workflows are to be published on a platform (a Wiki) which will serve for documentation, discussion and exchange purposes.

Cooperations & Long-term Archiving

The project will be conducted in close cooperation with authors and researchers of electronic literature as well as the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg (BSZ). The BSZ as operator of a trustworthy web archive assumes responsibility for the long-term archiving and provides a project platform on the basis of the software SWBcontent . The German Literature Archive Marbach ensures that the archive and the documentations generated during the project will be available on a long-term basis. During the project methods shall be proven and established which can be continued by the institution.

Contact

E-Mail to project staff