In May 2019, as part of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) – the pan-european infrastructure for arts and humanities scholars working with computational methods – began to form the Bibliographical Data Working Group, bringing together specialists from a number of different countries. In September 2019 the group was officially approved. The main goals of the group are to foster the development of cooperation between bibliographies and serve as a platform for knowledge exchange aimed at bringing together creators of bibliographical data, scholars interested in using those resources in data-driven research, and theorists of bibliography and documentation. One of the tasks the group members have set themselves for implementation that should be indicated here is facilitating international data-based cooperation. The mission statement of the DARIAH-EU Bibliographical Data Working Group states that this task can be accomplished, for example, by working towards adopting standards and introducing data processing procedures that would allow for future data exchange and combining datasets from different countries (with particular attention to issues of multilingualism, authority control and thesauri). For this reason, we, as members of this group, proposed to create a dictionary that would facilitate the identification of types of documents in different languages. This project was approved by the group and forwarded for further work. As the editors of this project, we want to present its methodological basis and – in this way – invite everyone who believes that this idea deserves to be put into effect to cooperate with us. This invitation is the most important thing in the project, as the high quality of this forthcoming dictionary can only be guaranteed by the cooperation of specialists who, firstly, are native speakers of the language in which they will prepare information about document types; secondly, have knowledge about terminology on the types of documents.
The project involves creating a normative source of information in the form of a dictionary informing about the meaning of individual terms identifying particular types of documents. The features determining the nature of this source of information require an instance. It is assumed that the forthcoming source of information will be a (4) multilingual, (5) controlled, (6) annotated, (2) encyclopaedic (1) dictionary in the scope of (3) types of documents (the numbers in brackets indicate the order in which they are discussed – reflecting the order of the features).
Dictionary of types of documents 