Every letter edition – whether printed or digitally published – can provide a digital index of letters in the “Correspondence Metadata Interchange Format” (CMIF) and register it with the web service correspSearch.
In order to create a CMIF file as easy as possible, you can use the provided CMIF Creator by correspSearch. net. The creation of a CMIF file using using the CMIF Creator is explained in detail below.
Call up the CMIF Creator and start a new digital index of letters by clicking on "Start".
In this step, enter information about the CMIF file you are currently editing. The following information must be provided:
In this step, enter the bibliographic information of the publication for which you provide the index of letters or from which you take the metadata of the letters. If necessary, you can also enter several publications. Please note that in the case of a multi-volume series, each volume is to be recorded individually.
Here you enter the metadata of the editions of letters - that is, the sender*in, place of writing, date and addressee*in, place and date of receipt. A new data record is created for each letter. Fill in as much information as you know; if there is no information (such as the date of receipt) you can simply leave the corresponding fields blank. Tip: With the Tab key you can quickly jump to the next field. The particulars in detail:
For every sender and recipient:
For all date types, a date in the format "YYYYY-MM-DD","YYYY-MM" or "YYYY" must be entered. All other data (e. g. 1808-03/04) cannot be processed technically. Therefore, these dates must be translated for the CMIF file.
The web service does not use their names to search for persons and places, since they can occur in several variants (spelling, non-uniform first names) as well as being ambiguous ("Peter Müller"). Rather, the search is based on cross-project IDs from standard files, such as the Common Standard File of the German National Library. For this reason, a standard ID should be recorded in the digital letter list for each person or location. The web service currently supports the following standard files for people:
For the German-speaking countries, it is advisable to search first in the GND. In addition to the search of the German National Library, it is also possible to search via "Online-GND" (OGND) of the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg. The interface of the OGND offers partly more comfortable possibilities to search for a specific person. It is recommended to set the search key of "Teilwortsuche[SW]" to "Person (Phrase: Nachname, Vorname)[PER]" in the OGND. If the search result is not satisfactory, you may want to reduce the first names or use the search key "person (Stichwort)[PST]".
If a person is not found in the GND, you can search for a standard ID via the Virtual International Authority File.
The locations are recorded with the help of GeoNames. The IDs can best be researched using GeoNames Advanced Search. It is important to select the appropriate "Feature Class" here. As a rule (i. e. in towns and villages) it should be set to "city, village...".
All standard data must be specified as complete URL, i. e."http://d-nb.info/gnd/118808850", so that the web service can process it correctly.
An information sheet (download as PDF; currently only available in German) from correspSearch also informs about the search for IDs in standard files.
You can save the CMIF file on your computer at any time in step 4. The file name is assigned from the title chosen in step 1 combined together with the current day and time.
You can edit the saved file at any time by loading an existing CMIF file instead of starting a new letter directory.
When you have finished compiling the letter index, you can save your CMIF file as XML. You must then make this XML file available online and register it with the web service correspSearch. To register, you only need to send us a short e-mail to correspsearch@bbaw.de with the URL of your CMIF file. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or problems with the creation of your index of letters, the use of the CMIF Creator or the publication of your CMIF file!
For more information see the FAQ section.