Establishing the Special Information Service for Jewish Studies in Germany

The Special Information Service for Jewish Studies intends to etablish a wide range of different internet based services and thus improve access to resources for the academic community interested in Jewish and Israel studies. The core is a web portal that will give access to aggregated bibliographical data and related information. The projected system can be divided into three main technical tasks: Building an efficient research user interface, re-implementing Hebrew script in the records of the library’s online catalog and enriching bibliographical records with information from discipline-specific external reference resources.

The virtual catalog will offer retrieval of thematic specified bibliographical metadata that are aggregated from two different library union catalog databases, thus providing comprehensive information on the subjects and connecting Hebrew and Arabic resources. Secondly a tool for automated reconversion processes of transliterated Hebrew titles will be developed in order to facilitate the search. Adding original Hebrew script to Romanized titles that are accessible in Latin script only will improve retrieval of these sources. The third task, in cooperation with Prof. Kai Eckert from the Stuttgart Media University, will focus on the contextualization of the library records, meaning extending the information in the online-catalog by using existing authority data and developing methods to match information about persons, places and other entities with the bibliographical records.

The lecture will present the overall technical and organizational architecture embedded in the existing library infrastructure and show first progresses.