N. Floor Clausen
For the past years a large work has been done in digitising the census
records. The results of this initiative are now so massive and obvious that
the interest for digitising sources is focusing on church records.
Church records have a much more complicated and varied structure than census
records have. As a starting point for digitising the church records a group
is working on establishing both the principles for the digitising and for
creating a metadata standard for church records.
Due to the complex nature of church records it is not realistic to make a
complete digitising of all the information in the church records.
Definitions on content, type, geography and time must be made. Church
records differ in time from originally chronological to event-based and a
mixture of the two types. As opposed to the cross sectional census records
church records stretches over many years and very often also comprises
information from more than one parish.
The group working on this topic is now establishing principles and hopefully
a standard for digitising church records. This paper will present the
principles and definitions that will constitute the basis for the further
work with digitising church records. It is to be expected that the
principles used for church records can be used for other complex historical
sources.
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