D. Zeldenrust
The end of 2004 saw the start of a brand new project at the Meertens Institute. Its name was Dimito, short for the DIgitization of rural MIcroTOponyms. Rural microtoponyms is the collective term for the names of small entities in both natural and man-made landscape. The first category covers all sorts of rugged features, such as moors, natural forests and marshes, as well as streams, lakes etcetera. The second covers cultivated landscape and includes individual parcels as well as arable land, grazing land and man-made forests. This collection of rural microtoponyms is the largest onomastic collection at Meertens. Often, the phenomenon is designated by the word ‘field name’, but this paper will use the word ‘microtoponym’.
For thirty years, the Meertens Institute has been gathering data on the plethora of microtoponyms in the Netherlands. This unique material comes mainly on handwritten cards which state the name, the origin of the name, the location and the soil composition and use. The collection contains an estimated 200,000 microtoponyms and over 1,700 topographical maps – mostly from the Kadaster (Dutch Land Registry Office) – upon which the microtoponyms are marked. These maps are referred to as ‘field name maps’ in the archives of the Meertens Instituut. This term will also be used in this paper.
This collection of microtoponyms is not only an excellent source of information for onomasticians inside and outside the Meertens Instituut, it is also a focus of interest for, amongst others, historians, historical geographers and archaeologists, partly because most of the names relate to parcels of land that have been swallowed up by land consolidation or urban expansion. If the microtoponyms could be digitized with the aid of a geographic information system (GIS) this would facilitate and open up new avenues of research in various disciplines.
Dimito is a pilot project. The key objective is to explore the potential for digitization on the basis of a small sample from the available material. The first part of this paper describes the cards and the field name maps. The second addresses the question of digitization. The third reviews the new opportunities offered by the digital database. The paper ends by answering the question that prompted the pilot in the first place: is it useful and feasible to digitize the entire collection?
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