LinkedCat+

Since its establishment in 1847, the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) has served as a significant forum for scholarly communication and knowledge production, documenting the sessions of its philosophical-historical and mathematical-natural science classes in 492 printed volumes. Conducted in cooperation with BAS:IS (Archives, Library, Collections: Information & Service, OeAW) and Open Knowledge Maps and funded by the OeAW Innovation fund, the LinkedCat+ project explores the reports from the years 1847 to 1918 through advanced cataloging processes and visualization techniques to make their content accessible easily to the public and to establish a valuable resource for researchers.

To this end, LinkedCat+ digitizes approximately 366,000 printed pages, applies OCR processes to them and meticously indexes their content in MARC 21 following the RDA (Resource Description & Access) guidelines with the RSWK (Regeln für die Schlagwortkatalogisierung) and the Basic Classification system for subject classification. Authors and contributors of the papers are largely linked using the GND (Gemeinsame Normdatei).

This rich dataset is then processed through a data enrichment pipeline and published in customized instance of the Open Knowledge Map system which provides sophisticated search capabilities and interactive visualization tools to facilitate dynamic exploration: Knowledge Maps provide a thematic overview of single keywords or authors, grouping similar publications and relating them visually to their other groups. Streamgraphs, on the other hand, depict the temporal evolution of the most frequent keywords associated with one author’s publications, thus providing a concise overview of the author’s developing research interests. By means of these distant reading methods, researchers and users can navigate the large LinkedCat+ corpus down to single texts which are availabe as PDF documents and gain deeper insights in the historical scholarly output of the OeAW.