About CODECS
CODECS, an acronym for Collaborative Online Database and e-Resources for Celtic Studies, is an online platform published by the A. G. van Hamel Foundation for Celtic Studies, a non-profit organisation based in the Netherlands. It presents an ongoing attempt at building a comprehensive catalogue/database of sources of interest to Celtic studies, including every text and manuscript ever written, together with an extensive bibliography. In addition, to enrich ways in which users can discover and explore these resources of the past, it provides structured information about the contents as well as contexts or provenances of the sources described. This includes making semantic links to persons, places, topics and other entities, which allows for different points of entry to users navigating the site. The focus is on pre-modern sources and for no reason other than the time restraints and particular interests of content editors, current coverage is mostly ‘slanted’ towards Irish and Hiberno-Latin material. The software used for data storage and querying is Semantic MediaWiki, which was found to be robust, flexible and pluggable. CODECS plays host to complementary projects such as Tionscadal na Nod, a resource for getting to grips with scribal abbreviations in Irish manuscripts. The website is designed to be collaborative and open to scholars looking to set up new projects within its infrastructure and ecosystem.
History (2010–present)
CODECS was founded by Dennis Groenewegen (A. G. van Hamel Foundation for Celtic Studies) and it could be said, with some justification, that the history of CODECS began in earnest in the second half of 2010. A single wiki platform was launched, but separate project names were employed for the bibliography (*selgā), which continued an earlier database of the same name, and for the catalogue of texts and manuscripts (*datlā). It was not until 2013 that the name CODECS was adopted for the project and platform as a whole. In practice, as time went by, the use of said names for the catalogue and bibliography has been silently phased out. Tionscadal na Nod was added in 2011 and has retained a distinct project title.
