With correspSearch you can search within the metadata of diverse scholarly editions of letters. One can search according to the letter's sender, adressee, as well as place and date of the letter's creation.
This web services assembles and analyzes files in the Correspondence Metadata Interchange (CMI) format which is based on the TEI extension "correspDesc" developed by the TEI Correspondence SIG.
The bibliographic information of the scholarly editions can be found in the data overview.
The database is continually growing. Any published scholarly edition of letters (in print or digital form) can create an index according to the "Correspondence Metadata Interchange" format and register with the web service correspSearch.
correspSearch v2 online
The next generation of the correspSearch web service has gone online. It now offers greatly improved search and filtering options as well as its own map-based search, which can be used to search for letters from a specific area in a specific time period. The whole website is now responsive and can thus also be used on mobile devices. Finally, a lot has been done "under the hood": the entire harvesting and ingest process has been improved.
»with apologies for the delay that has occured, I have the honour to be, with the highest respect, My dear Sir, Your faithful & obedient servant«
Wilhelm von Humboldt - Spachwissenschaftliche Korrespondenz William Marsden an Wilhelm von Humboldt, 21.05.1831, CC BY 4.0
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The JavaScript widget csLink refers from an edited letter in its own digital edition to temporally nearby letters of the correspondence partners from other editions. For this purpose, the correspSearch API is queried in real time. The widget csLink available for download. [More Information]
The API allows you to query correspSearch automatically and integrate the results into your own website.
Query results are provided as TEI-XML files. See the documentation of the interface to learn about how to set up a query.
If you have general questions or feedback concerning "correspDesc", the CMI format or the Webservice "correspSearch", you can join the mailing list of the TEI SIG Correspondence and post your request there. This allows other scholars to contribute to the discussion.
Otherwise (and especially if you want to report an error found in the web service) you can of course send us an email.
| Letter versions¹ | 243,300 |
| Persons² | 20,599 |
| Places² | 6,108 |
| Publications | 436 |
| CMIF files | 290 |
| Oldest letter | 01/01/1510 |
| Most recent letter | 17/12/2010 |
Notes on statistics: 1: A letter can sometimes be published in multiple editions, i.e. in several versions. 2: Persons and places that have been assigned a URI from a authority file or from the project itself.