BærUt! Network and Skills Hub for Sustainable Digital Scholarly Editions at the University of Oslo

BærUt! is a network and competence hub for promoting Digital Scholarly Editions (DSE). It is based at, and financed (2024-2026) by, the University of Oslo, with the leading of the project placed at the University of Oslo Library. Its target are researchers, developers, and cultural heritage specialists working on creating, maintaining, researching and archiving DSE, regardless of language, period, discipline or subject. BærUt!’s ambition is to consolidate expertise and knowledge in the field, gather researchers and practitioners, and, in the long run, create the foundation for a common platform for DSE.

At the University of Oslo Library, we work closely with researchers, developers and cultural institutions to digitize historical and cultural text documents, and ensure these resources are accessible and useful for academic use. Today's digitalization takes place through semi-structured formats that meet international standards for markup and metadata. This ensures data interoperability, but the same cannot always be said about the systems and user interfaces involved. We are also aware that a wide range of digital projects – many involving non-Norwegian material – fall outside the preservation mandates of both the Norwegian National Library and the National Archives, and that small humanities research communities often face challenges in transferring expertise and preserving resources after the completion of projects.

Our project’s aim is to address all these limitations by establishing long-term solutions for archiving and access of all the mentioned material, thereby ensuring that digital materials abide by the FAIR principles. BærUt! is thus a collective step towards ensuring that our digital scholarly editions remain perpetually relevant and accessible to all communities and research.

The network is organized in nodes addressing different aspects of digital scholarly editing (Digital Editions & Philology, Materiality, Automatic Text Recognition (OCR), XML/TEI, Databases, User Interfaces), but has also bi-monthly open network meetings with all participants, and organizes workshops on foundational and advanced methods (XML/TEI, MEI, relational and graph databases) and on data management and documentation for DSE, seminars for sharing experiences and development, and conferences discussing DSE for different academic environments.

A central part of the project consists in mapping the state of DSE in Norway (also in comparison with other countries). This implies: systematically mapping existing and planned DSEs, with a special focus on data types and structures, systems, technical infrastructure, and documentation; identifying conditions, frameworks, procedures, and infrastructures necessary for long-term archiving and accessibility. The final goal of the mapping is the development of a feasibility study for establishing infrastructure for DSE at the national level, which will then result in a joint whitepaper on "Recommendations for the Long-Term Archiving, Accessing, and Maintenance of Digital Scholarly Editions Created in Norwegian Academic and Cultural Heritage Institutions".

Dissemination of the project happens through the blog DSEnetwork (https://dsenetwork.hypotheses.org/), on the open academic blogging platform Hypotheses.org., where researchers associated with the network publish short articles about DSE projects for a wider audience, participate in discussions, write opinion pieces, and make presentations from workshops, seminars and conferences available.