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The Humboldt digital library (HDL) represents an innovative system to access the works and legacy of Alexander von Humboldt in a digital form on the Internet (www.avhumboldt.net). It contributes to the key question about how to present interconnected data in an appropriate form using information technologies. The HDL has been created as a dynamic digital library with the capability of connecting multilingual and multimedia data from diverse online archives. Humboldt’s volumes have become available, but beyond that any relevant information related to the observations of Humboldt, even outside the works can become immediately accessible. This makes it possible to recognize natural changes and compare Humboldt’s descriptions with recent situations. The technology we have developed addresses the issues of sustainability and makes it possible to detect changes in the environment since the time of Humboldt’s observations.
Applied Information Technology opens Virtual Platform for the Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt
(2011)
The Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) is a project that aims to provide digital access to the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt. The HDL runs on an open source library developed in the Hochschule Offenburg and provides a virtual research environment in which researchers can work more effectively. This article presents the development made in the HDL to provide alternative ways of content dissemination through the OAI protocol.Through the implemtantion of the OAI-PMH data provider in the HDL, the library is accessibly in many universities and research centers everywhere around the globe.
After approximately 200 years, a comprehensive access to the texts of Humboldt’s extraordinary exploration of the Americans is within sight. To open the legacy to the public for free access the Humboldt Digital Library (HDL) project has been developing a dynamic amount of data related to studies of Alexander von Humboldt. The library includes a range of texts, tables and images, as well as many tools that assist mining the data and navigating the system.
To do justice to the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt, a 19th century German scientist and explorer an information and knowledge management system is required to preserve the author’s original intent and promote an awareness of all his relevant works. Although all of Humboldt's works can be found on the internet as digitized papers, the complexity and internal interconnectivity of the writings is not very transparent. Humboldt's concepts of interaction cannot be adequately represented only by digitized papers or scanned documents.
The Humboldt Portal is an attempt to create a new generation of digital libraries, providing a new form of interaction and synthesis between humanistic texts and scientific observation. The digital version of his documents supplies dynamic links to sources, maps, images, graphs and relevant texts in accordance with his visions, because “everything is interconnectedness”.