The project Norwegian Correspondences aims to link individual letters and other correspondence media not only to each other but to correspondences across all of Norway, Europe and beyond. It uses the CorrespSearch infrastructure, which employs Linked Open Data standards. Correspondence metadata from digitized letters, digital as well as printed scholarly editions is delivered in the Correspondence Metatdata Interchange Format (CMIF). Via the CorrespSearch web interface, data can be easily searched|or queried via an open API.
The National Library of Norway has a substantial amount of private historical correspondences in its holdings,6 some of them are edited and published, either in printed editions or in digital form. In addition, other Norwegian cultural heritage institutions, like the Munch Museum, but also the university libraries of 6 The manuscript catalogue contains almost 200.000 individual letters from as early as 1378 to quite recent material.
The Arctic University of Norway and the University of Bergen7 and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology University Library, hold signi cant collections of letters and are continually preparing digital editions of letters and correspondences of key gures of Norwegian public and academic life. Yet, all these correspondence projects lead a solitary existence{hidden either in editions of single authors or as digitized collections or individual pieces on institutional servers.
As a dialogical genre by nature, the full potential of letters and other correspondance material lies in the connection of the individuals writing and receiving letters, postcards, and telegrams{at a speci c time and from and to a speci c place. But because the collections of letters and individual pieces of a correspondence are historically distributed wide and far in regards to geography and institution, there rarely exist links between them. Thus research on correspondence networks that existed in Norway, the Nordic Countries{and beyond, to Europe and the rest of the world{as well as research on the letter as the main means of written interpersonal communication for centuries is almost impossible.
The project Norwegian Correspondences (NorKorr, from Norwegian Norske
korrespondanser ) aims to link these individual letters and similar materials not
only to each other but to correspondences in all of Norway, Europe, and beyond
by making use of the CorrespSearch [
The aim of the NorKorr project is to aggregate and provide correspondence metadata from Norwegian editions of correspondences from di erent projects, institutions and collections in a format that can be ingested by CorrespSearch. The metadata in question are comprised of: 1. Names of writer and recipient of the letter (preferably with reference to the
Virtual International Authority File VIAF). [
In addition to aggregating the metadata from digital and printed editions,
NorKorr aims to incorporate all digitized correspondence material. This means
that all manuscript and private archive collections throughout Norway which
have undergone or will undergo digitization and assign individual URNs to each
letter together with a minimum of metadata (often derived from manuscript
catalogues) will be interconnected. [
We see this expansion to be an important step towards making digital collections accessible and searchable cross-institutionally, a feature that is usually prevented by mutually incommensurable in-house solutions regarding encoding standards, cataloguing methods and metadata standards. In addition, because it is commonly only a small and often strongly canonised selection of authors, musicians, artists and academics whose letters are deemed worthy of a scholarly edition, the picture we have of Norwegian correspondence networks and Norwegian cultural contacts with the other Nordic countries and the rest of the world is strongly biased and non-representative. NorKorr is able to include correspondence material regardless of language, time period, social class, gender, and nationality. 3 3.1
We present a collaboratively created poster where we focus on ve cases of correspondence collections at Norwegian cultural heritage institutions. For the cases, we decided to be as diverse and multifaceted as possible. We will describe the collections of letters of each contributing institution and the speci c challenges each of these collections poses in regard to content, technology, and work ows we have established for connecting our correspondences. 3.2
Case 1 { Letters from Norwegian Writer and Feminist Camilla
Collett (1813-1895)
The National Library of Norway has approximately 1.000 letters written by
Norwegian author Camilla Collett in its manuscript collection. More than half
of these letters have never been published. Collett's handwriting is di cult to
read and there has been little research on them. We want to make the letters more
available by transcribing, encoding, and publishing them. One of the publications
is a digital edition containing ca. 50 letters written by Collett between 1841{1851.
The edition is part of the library's source edition series NB kilder, published on
the e-book website Bokselskap. [
Case 2 { Letters to and from Norwegian Artist Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Norwegian artist Edvard Munch's correspondence with family and friends, and with assistants, patrons, collectors, art dealers, printers, newspaper and magazine editors, artists, writers, art historians, exhibition organisers, gallery owners, shipping companies, and more, comprises more than 10.000 known letters and letter drafts.
Among the more than 800 senders and 400 recipients currently in our online
registers [
Case 3 { Correspondence Collections from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology University Library The following four letter collections highlight the special collections of NTNU University Library through their international correspondence, thus showing their importance for adding them to a shared database.
The Royal Norwegian Society for Sciences and Letters Collection
(DKNVS) consists of 3.738 letters from the rst 100 years (1760-1860) of its
existence, among them letters from Carl von Linne, Artur Schopenhauer, Henrik
Wergeland, Ivar Aasen, and many other known people who played a part in
culture and science in that historical period. Thorvald Boeck (1835-1901) was a
famous collector and known for assembling what was the largest private library
of its time in Norway. The collection of 2.294 letters from 1784-1865 is diverse
and consists among others of Royal senders and other famous persons. Mikael
Heggelund Foslie (1855-1909) was one of the most important international
researchers on the systematics of non-geniculate coralline red algae at the turn
of the 19th century. From 1892 until his death he worked in Trondheim as a
curator at the Museum of the Royal Norwegian Society for Sciences and
Letters. His correspondence is an example of a worldwide scienti c communication
and discussion and the exchange of species among scientists. This collection of
letters on botanical issues from 1884-1909 consists of 1.963 letters [
Case 4 { The Letter Collections at University of Bergen Library By focusing on three disparate collections of letters from the Section for Special Collections, we wish to show the value and potential of linking and contextualizing these collections in a correspondence database.
The rst collection, Ms 790 [
Byron. As a curated collection, the letters defy a normal correspondence pattern. However, within a correspondence database new links to similar collections and related letters can elucidate the original correspondence.
The second collection, Ms 2083 [
Finally, Ms 2155 [
During several decades, Qvigstad was involved in an extensive
correspondence with other experts on Sami from Norway, Scandinavia, and other
countries. Some of Qvigstad's letters were digitized, transcribed, and published online
as part of the Documentation Project [
Library is to re-edit the letters according to the requirements of a modern digital scholarly edition, including the following enhancements: { Providing high resolution tif/jpg facsimile images { SGML to XML/TEI P5 conversion of the transcription { Embedding in virtual research environment for humanities: TextGrid { Up-to-date web interface
In addition, the letters to Sophus Bugge (1833-1907) will be included. In collaboration with the National Library of Norway, a selection of letters will be published as a reader-friendly edition in NB kilder. 3.7
In the spririt of Open Science, the project NorKorr is collectively developed on GitHub https://github.com/arockenberger/NorKorr in plain view. It is open for collaborators from all Norwegian cultural heritage institutions (ALM sector), the universities and other research institutions, individual researchers as well as any organisations or individuals who hold collections of relevant correspondence material. We document our code and share it under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. We build on the work shared by the CorrespSearch developer team, the TEI Correspondence SIG and the individual researchers and developers on GitHub and beyond.