Digital Sustainability: Relaunch of the MHDBDB

The Middle High German Conceptual Database (MHDBDB) is a freely accessible, complex search engine for medieval and early modern literature. It provides access to the most important works of Middle High German poetry and numerous other texts from a variety of perspectives via an extremely versatile search function. The MHDBDB was founded in the early 1970s, has been online as an information system since 1995, has been maintained at the University of Salzburg since 2002, and was donated to the University of Salzburg in 2016. Currently, a complete redesign and migration is under development; this project is a part of that process. The existing texts will be converted into the XML-TEI format and metadata managed according to RDF standards. A new query language will make the complex searches intuitive to use. The website will have a responsive design and become faster. The linkage with external data sources (e.g. the Semantic Web like LOD) as well as the export of the data into the most different formats and the full access to most texts will be possible in the future. As of August 2019, there are 666 texts in the corpus of the MHDBDB.

The current frontend is past its prime and is in urgent need of general renovation. Therefore preparations are already being made for a relaunch, for which, however, neither the required financial nor the human resources have been made available to date. The aim of the project is to provide the necessary IT and development basis to enable interoperability, accessibility, re-usability and sustainability of existing data.