User Guide: Browsing MOM CA

The data provided by MOM-CA can be accessed via the archival representation or via a scholarly organisation of the data. Both browsing methods can represent the same document but usually they convey different material.

The archival represenation (menu item "archives") contains the documents as they are organised in the archives, i.e. in countries, regions, archives and archival fonds. The metadata in this section relies on the efforts the archivists have put into the description of their fonds. You can expect to find at least an image and a date of each charter, although some archives provided only descriptive metadata (date, abstract) and no images and others have put charters online without being able to give any detailed description. Usually the archives are engaged in putting a whole fonds online, i.e. you can expect to find the "complete" collection of documents stored in the respective archival fonds.

The scholarly organisation (menu item "collections") contains documents which can be preserved in different archives, even in no archives at all but only in printed chartularies. Every scholar has its own interest in selecting the documents and the story how the data has become part of monasterium.net can be very different. There are for example huge amounts of transcriptions of Latin documents from England in the DEEDS dataset, lots of digitised charter edition from Google Books (marked with "Google data"), the digitised version of the regional charter book from San Gall enriched by images from the archives (e.g. Chartularium Sangallense III), reconstructed archives from Italy (e.g. Archivio virtuale del monastero dei SS. Pietro e Sebastiano, selections of charters from Serbian kings in different archives (e.g. in the City Archives of Dubrovnik, collections of documents from different archives (e.g. the Teutonic Order) etc. etc. There is a rudimentary classification of these collections by geography, type of documents, time of creation and the user who created the collection.