FROM UNIVERSITY MATRICULATION REGISTERS TO HISTORICAL PERSONAL DATABASES. DIGITISATION, INDEXING AND PROSOGRAPHIC CLASSIFICATION

The tradition of matriculation records at the University of Heidelberg dating back to the founding year 1386 is currently being digitized as part of a DFG project. At the end of the 19th century, these records were made accessible by an edition up to the year 1870. Together with a database structure developed at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the foundations have been laid for the creation of a database of the university members in Heidelberg for the period 1386 to 1920.

In order to guarantee a certain uniformity of indexing for Baden-Württemberg, the university archives here have joined forces in an initiative to digitize, according to uniform standards, the oldest records, including the matriculation registers, and make them accessible online. The list-like form of the matriculation entries, as well as their special significance for research on the history of the university and for any enquiries about former members of the university, makes it possible and meaningful to record them together, thus allowing simultaneous searches through several matriculation records from different provenances.
At a conference on the Southwest German university matriculation registers, which took place in May 2019 in the Archives of Heidelberg University, an overview of the type and extent of the existing holdings and of the practices of their digital presentation was given. 3 At the same time, the conference served as a coordination point for the indexing of matriculation records in the recently started DFG-project "Archival search aids and sources: Digitisation of foundation documents and statutes as well as registers and personnel directories of the Baden-Württemberg university archives in Freiburg,Heidelberg,Hohenheim,Stuttgart and Tübingen". 4 The documents to be recorded in Heidelberg include almost 70 register books dating back to the late medieval period when the university was founded, including the important matriculation registers from 1386 to 1920 and the Rectorsʼ books from 1385 to 1625. 5 This project initially aims at the digitisation, cursory indexing and online presentation of the digitised material. In addition, there are plans for a subsequent joint matriculation portal of the university archives in Baden-Württemberg.
In Heidelberg, where the digitization of the register volumes has already been completed 6 and the preparation of the contents is currently in progress, a pilot project to implement a historical personal database of university members from the beginnings in 1386 to the year 1920 can be started soon thanks to the extensive preliminary indexing work. Thus, a matriculation edition created by G. Toepke at the end of the 19th century for the period 1386-1870 7 has .uni-rostock.de/>, seen 30.07.2019) and soon the related contributions in the volume H. already been digitized and an encyclopaedia of the group of professors, the "Heidelberger Gelehrtenlexion" for the years 1386-1986, compiled by D. Drüll, has now been completed. 8 The only gaps in the Heidelberg register tradition arose in the 17th century during the Thirty Yearsʼ War and the War of the Palatinate Succession. Thus the university was closed from 1632 to 1652 and from 1689 to 1703, and the matriculation register for the years 1663-1689 was lost, when it probably became a victim of the flames in the house of the rector of the university during the French sacking of Heidelberg on 22 May 1693. 9 For the period 1663-1668, however, Toepke was able to refer to a copy in the General State Archive Karlsruhe and published the information in his second volume as ʻAppendix Iʼ. 10 G. Toepke's preliminary work is not limited to simply producing an edition of the main volumes of the matriculation register, but is supplemented by much biographical information (Figs. 1/1 and 1/2), which will also be included in the now planned Historical People Database of the University of Heidelberg. Toepke supplemented his second volume with seven appendices, consisting of the copy of the register 1663-1668 in the General State Archives, mentioned above, as well as lists of faculties, doctoral lists and a list of rectors up to 1668. 11 It should be noted that, for example, in the name lists of the Faculty of Arts, he does not clearly define what is actually in the text and what was added by him as additional information from other sources. This prosopographic information, which goes beyond the mere entries, leads to the technical side of the planned personal database, the aim of which will be a mixture of the best possible digital object indexing and prosopographic documentation.
This digital instrument does not have to be completely recreated, but already exists as a database specialized in personal sources in archives, which is online in a pilot version with the entries from the matriculation book of the Old University of Duisburg. 12 The detailed manuscript consists of 150 pages and contains 5,938 entries in the register of the Rector. This register was first edited in 1938 by Pastor Wilhelm Rotscheidt (1872Rotscheidt ( -1945 with the title Die Matrikel der Universität Duisburg 1652-1818. 13 However, this edition has not been digitized as it contains some reading errors, but extensive digital preliminary work has already been carried out. Back in the 1980s Manfred Komorowski began to build up a bio-bibliographic database for the staff of the Old University of Duisburg (1655-1818) in the University Library of Duisburg. In addition to the central data of the curriculum vitae (dates of birth, death, matriculation, doctorate etc.), an attempt was made to research as many academic stations and activities as possible. In addition, there are references to sources and literature. At the end of the 1990s, as part of a DFG-project at the University of Duisburg under the direction of Eckehart Stöve and with the collaboration of Joseph Wijnhoven, Manfred Komorowski and Barbara Fink, a web edition was created in which the old book edition by Wilhelm Rotscheidt (1938) is presented online in a revised version (Fig. 2). 14 Parallel to the work put in on digitizing the Duisburg matriculations, a database of Medieval Persons and Groups of Persons (Datenbank mittelalterlicher Personen und Personengruppen, abbreviated DMP) existed at the Duisburg chair of medieval history of Dieter Geuenich. Although the source spectrum recorded in it was limited to the period of the early Middle Ages up to about 800 A.D. 15 There were also lists with large quantities of name documents with a variety of spelling in the focus -a problem that is of great relevance for personal databases, not only for medieval names, but also for name variations from the early modern period. The DMP contains almost 400 000 name records, to which about 60 000 name records were added, which had been collected in the Internet database of the project at the beginning of the 2000s as part of the DFG-project Name und Gesellschaft. Personennamen als Indikatoren für sprachliche, ethnische, soziale und kulturelle Gruppenzugehörigkeit ihrer Träger (3.-8. Jahrhundert), known by the abbreviation Nomen et gens. 16 The basis is a digital indexing of name lists from early medieval necrology and fraternization books, originally developed in the 1960s on punched cards. 17 As a digital indexing tool, it forms a preliminary work for MGH editions of the Libri memoriales et Necrologia and enables specific name searches through a semi-automatic lemmatisation format for the various early medieval name forms and variants 18 . The record was entered using special characters in a single string in fields divided by slashes ( Fig. 3/1) -in the first half of the 1990s, a database mask in DOS format was created to aid data entry with descriptions of the data fields ( Fig. 3/2 As part of a pilot project for a DFG proposal, an access format (A-DMP) was developed from the original csv version of the DMP at the end of the 1990s, and was presented at the conference of the International Council of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS) in Santiago de Compostela in 1999 (Fig. 4). 19 Starting from previous versions, this was the first time that index card views with thumbnails and relational database elements had offered the possibility of linking individual entries with images from original pages, allowing direct control of the individual name transcriptions on the screen. The basic csv table format of the data itself was retained.
Based on this, a database concept for the indexing of personal archives (Datenbankkonzept zur Erschließung personenbezogenen Archivguts, abbreviated DEPA) with an executable access database was created in 2003 within the framework of a thesis at the Archives School in Marburg on the basis of various documents from the Civil Status Archives in Brühl and Detmold as well as the Duisburg university register. 20 Like the DMP before it, the DEPA, which is geared towards Late Medieval and Early Modern archive documents, basically starts from the single document, and as developed for the Access variant of the DMP, it also offers a list view with all the name entries available on one page or in a document (Fig. 5). Modular in design, it can be used to call up further, relationally linked information in the categories of persons, sources, literature and illustrations. In these segments, however, it is also possible to work directly on the person entries independently of the indexing of the individual documents.
The relational structure of DEPA then served as a blueprint for the database of the matriculations of the old University of Duisburg (Fig. 6), which was programmed as a web version in 2007-2010. This was initiated by the newly founded University Archives of Duisburg-Essen supported by Heike Hawicks of the Department of History there as well as in cooperation with the University Library Duisburg-Essen and Stefan Böttcher's Department of Computer Science at the University of Paderborn, whose collaborator Rita Hartel realized the implementation as a web database in the years 2009-2010. 21 As with its predecessors A-DMP and DEPA, the database of the matriculation register of the Old University of Duisburg is based on each individual entry in the register and attempts to provide the complete context information together with as accurate a dating as possible, which also allows a search in half-year steps. At the same time, it offers the possibility of linking to personal data fed from the bio-bibliographic database and stored in the Comment field.
Since in this case it is only a matter of editing the register of one university, multiple documents for one person do not yet occur frequently, but as soon as matriculations of other universities are included in a search, it will be particularly important to establish controlled references between the respective individual entries and the persons identified in order to make the peregrinatio academica 22 visible on the basis of successive entries. This is done in the separate table Personen (Fig. 7), which is based on the individual entries assigned to a person and the bio-bibliographical data from Manfred Komorowski's database mentioned above. In addition, there are directories of matriculation sources and literature, which serve as online aids for all academics conducting research in this area. At the same time, if the source is not available in list form but consists, for example, of detailed personal index cards, it is again possible to edit this separate personal area immediately, independent of the source indexing. Starting from a handwritten list of names that is typical for matriculation registers, entries made by one's own hand often cause reading problems, as mentioned above. Therefore, the database offers the possibility to check the reading on the original online (Fig. 8). 23 The list of successively entered persons can, however, not only be viewed in its original form but also, as with the predecessors A-DMP and DEPA, in a tabular view in which the further entries on the page are displayed starting from the respective name document in the register data sheet Personeneintrag ( Fig. 9/1).
From each name line, it is possible to switch to the appropriate full entry. The background of this function is the search for recognizable groups that may have changed universities together. In order to make such networks visible, this group search should be set so that the entries do not have to be in the same order and not directly next to each other. It is important that the database has a critical mass of names. This is also a prerequisite for other research approaches, e.g. the denominational distribution of students or supra-regional name research of personal and place names mentioned in the matriculation registers.
But already in the Duisburg entries there are references to the peregrinatio academica, where students are re-enrolled at the original university after a stay at another universitye.g. to gain a doctorate. This can be shown with the example of the name search "Andreae". Tobias Andreae (Bremensis, purioris philosophiae studiosus. Accessit ex publica schola Herbornensi), who was first registered in Duisburg in 1652, but spent a year in Leiden before returning to Duisburg. This can already be deduced from the Duisburg entry Tobias Andreae, Saxo Bremensis, 15 Augusti. Veniebat Lugduno-Batavorum ad capessendum gradum in medicina et phil. for the year 1659.
The entries for 1652 and 1659 with identical names can thus be assigned to the same person Tobias Andreae ( Fig. 9/2) -a click on the appropriate list entry leads to the name entry with all the context information. In this case, if the matriculations from Leiden were included in the web database, further individual documents would be added to the same person, because there is the entry Tobias Andreae Bremensis for the year 1658, and the next identical entry from the year 1661 shows that the same Tobias Andreae apparently returned from Duisburg to Leiden a second time afterwards. 24 The exemplary relationships of the University of Duisburg with the University of Leiden shown here are a good example of the fact that it will be of central importance to enable a comprehensive search in as many matriculation registers as possible of as many universities as possible. 25 Cartographic visualization options such as those developed for the database of the Repertorium Academicum Germanicum (RAG) might also be used here. 26 Of central importance for archival practice is the flexibility provided by a modular structure, with which different entry formats are available for very different forms of personal sources. Thus, the prosopographic module can also be processed independent of the indexing of the list entries. In a fourth step, further digital copies can be added to the personal entries. In Heidelberg, these would mainly be the personal files that began in the 16th century and were handed down in dense form from the 19th century onwards, the student files beginning in 1880, and also the rich picture records of university members.
However, when indexed name documents from different locations are linked, the problem of the different spellings of names in the Germanic, Romance and Slavic linguistic areas, which is already latent in university registries, is exacerbated, which is why specific coding formats are provided for the database. 27 For the forthcoming pilot project of a historical personal database of the University of Heidelberg, the focus will initially be on the period 1386 to 1920. These 534 years are unproblematic with regard to the protection periods for personal documents and include the considerable number of 115 450 matriculation entries in 15 volumes. With the digitisation of these volumes a first step has been taken, now the indexing work follows, in which not only will the Toepke edition, reaching up to the year 1870 be converted into a reviewed and searchable database format, but also nearly 45 000 new entries for the period 1871-1920 will be transcribed for the first time.

Conclusion
The database model for university matriculations presented here was modelled on the Access database for medieval groups of persons and groups of persons (A-DMP) and implemented using the example of the matriculation register of the Old University of Duisburg. Specified to archive practice, it offers, in a first step, the possibility of making the name material accessible in the respective digitized register volume in a precise and directly verifiable manner. The name material of a volume can then be combined with that of other volumes from the same archive location or other provenances without losing its reference to the original page. In a third step, these collected name entries can be successively merged into personal entries that can be linked with personal entries in the RAG 28 and, of course, in the Gemeinsamen Normdatei (GND) 29 -whereby it is to be expected that numerous new GND numbers will be created through the digital indexing of the individual documents in the university registers.