Workflow Dynamics on the Mnemosine Academic Digital Library: Integrating Data and Expertise

The primary aim of the Mnemosine Academic Digital Library, which focuses on rare and overlooked Spanish literary texts published between 1868 and 1936, is to curate, classify, and digitally showcase works that have fallen into oblivion. This endeavor facilitates a retrospective exploration of the period, highlighting texts and authors who were eclipsed by the prominent literary figures of early 20th-century Spanish culture. The accomplishment of this mission has been a synergistic effort among Spanish literary scholars, library data experts, and computer developers.

 We aim to introduce Clavy, an experimental research platform that has enabled specialists to salvage, purify, enrich, and systematically organize the data intrinsic to this library. The central goal for computer scientists has been the creation of Clavy, a platform designed for the administration of highly specialized and adaptable digital collections. Clavy boasts an advanced navigational system capable of browsing, filtering, and searching, thus endowing users with the ability to perform in-depth analyses of collections replete with substantial data volumes and complex interrelations.

 For experts in Spanish literature, the goal has been the recovery and expansion of the corpus of 'rare and forgotten' artists, texts, sources, and genres attributed to The Other Silver Age. Librarians have focused on importing data and generating metadata from national and international public libraries, refining and interlinking them to cultivate specialized collections within the database, and utilizing tools that bolster interoperability with other systems and platforms. With Clavy's assistance, metadata for over six thousand digitized objects from institutions such as the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the HathiTrust Digital Library, the University of California Library, and the Bibliothek des Ibero-Amerikanischen Instituts in Berlin have been assimilated into the Mnemosine database.

 The results of our research have paved the way to the theoretical realm of digital cultural history concerning the Silver Age of Spanish Literature, as evidenced by the publication of a monograph in the Q1-ranked journal Signa, and another by Peter Lang Publishing. The data and metadata of Mnemosine are readily accessible on platforms such as Zenodo, Github, and Wikidata. In May 2022, the Mnemosine Digital Library was distinguished with the award for the Best Tool, Resource, or Infrastructure developed in Spain in 2021 by the Spanish Association of Digital Humanities, and it has received commendations from the Office of Transfer of Research Results at the Complutense University of Madrid. Globally, the Mnemosine Digital Library is incorporated within the Time Machine Europe Project.