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Old Croatian Journals

Old Croatian Journals is the central portal that provides access to digitised Croatian journals from the collections of National and University Library in Zagreb and other heritage institutions in Croatia. The aim of the Portal is to enable access of the oldest Croatian scholarly and professional journals to the cultural and scholarly community as well as to the general public.

The Portal currently contains four journals continuously published since 1859: Bullettino di archeologia e storia Dalmata (since 1878), Napredak (since 1859), Starohrvatska prosvjeta (since 1895) and Sv. Cecilija (since 1877). Full texts of digitised journals can be searched through the Portal interface. In addition, the user can browse titles of the 19th century Croatian scholarly and professional journals and view metadata of individual titles.

The Portal was developed from the pilot project entitled Digitisation of Old Croatian Journals, financially supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, and realised in the National and University Library in Zagreb during 2008 and 2009 within the national project Croatian Cultural Heritage. The pilot project represents the first phase of a broader project of digitisation of old Croatian journals. The project aim is to develop a system for cooperative input of digital images, metadata and holdings information pertaining to journals titles in the National and University Library in Zagreb and other heritage institutions. The basic motive was to ensure broad access to Croatian scholarly journals and to protect their originals. Systematic digitisation ensures preservation of valuable originals and extensive usage of digitised copies. The content management system includes six modules: ingestion, data/metadata management, storage, access, administration and optical character recognition (OCR).

Development of common standards and digitisation procedures and uniform metadata input will, in the long run, make possible rationalisations and savings in national digitisation projects.

The Portal also includes: links to digitised journals online available elsewhere, data on locally available digitised journals, data on journals that are being digitised, data on digitisation plans, projects and collections, data on participating institutions, and so on.

Authors: Maja Jokić, Sofija Klarin, Jasenka Zajec.

Outsourcing: Conscius, d.o.o. and ARHIVPro, d.o.o.