Basic information
The Digital Library of the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University (DL FF MU) is an institutional full-text database that provides access to the Faculty's monographic and periodical production, both retrospective and current. It captures journals, proceedings (including occasional or conference proceedings) and monographs and contains not only their metadata (bibliographic) records but also full texts, most of which are freely available. DL FF MU is managed by the Centre for Information Technology of FF MU and is accessible through the Digitalia MUNI ARTS infrastructure. The current version of the database has been created in the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ project (large research infrastructure funded by the Czech Ministry of Education, LM2018101).
Content and scope
The content of the digital library is limited to documents that have been or are published directly by the faculty. As a whole, the DL FF MU is therefore not an overview of the publishing activities of individual academic members of the faculty, but a presentation of the institution's corporately sponsored outputs.
DL FF MU contains the following documents in full retrospect:
- the monographic edition of the Writings of the Faculty of Arts of Masaryk University in Brno, published from 1923 until now;
- all series of the Proceedings of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Brno from 1952-2012;
- all key journals in the field, published since 1991 in continuity with the previous Proceedings or newly established.
Furthermore, DL FF MU contains:
- other selected journals;
- selected book editions;
- selected non-periodical publications published outside the editions.
Faculty’s Proceedings and all journals are regularly updated with new additions, so that in recent years the DL FF MU has added about ten monographs, 60 issues of journals and about 500 scientific articles to its collection.
The database currently (2022) contains:
- 22 series (marked with letters A to X) of the Proceedings of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Brno (1952–2012);
- 31 journal titles, of which 28 are ongoing, regularly updated;
- three general book editions;
- 12 specialised book editions, more than half of which are updated with new additions;
- over 100 monograph titles published outside the editions.
Most of these documents are available in full text, giving the user immediate, unrestricted access to the order:
- 25,000 journal articles, the majority of which are in Czech (about 53%), English (15%) and German (9%);
- 800 monographs, about 60% of which are in Czech and the rest in other languages, dominated by English, German, French, Russian and Spanish.
History
The first version of the DL FF MU was made available on 1 May 2013 after several-years projects initiated by Jiří Rambousek and Zbyněk Sviták in 2006. The project was launched in 2009 by the Library Information Centre at the Institute of Computing Science of Masaryk University, with the participation of a number of experts from other parts of the Faculty of Arts. The digital library was created using technologies, tools and procedures developed in the Czech Digital Mathematical Library DML-CZ.
Miroslav Bartošek, the then head of the Institute of Computing Science of Masaryk University, and the librarian Zdeňka Mácková, who dedicated her 2011 master's thesis to the documentation of the creation of the DL FF MU, were instrumental in the creation of the DL FF MU. The project also involved Markéta Jurášová (project management in the first years), Dominik Szalai, Vlastimil Krejčíř, Michal Růžička, Petr Kovář (development of software tools), Hana Vochozková (expert advice and consultation), Jana Chamonikolasová, Jiří Rambousek and the staff of the Central Library of FF MU. Many students also helped to a greater or lesser extent: Miroslav Blažek, Zuzana Čepeláková, Lucie Fabriková, Magdalena Grabczyńska, Marie Gregárková, Hana Habermannová, Martina Kolářová, Božena Kováčová, Zdeněk Krpoun, Vojtěch Kubík, Andrej Kurochenko, Marie Kvapilová, Pavla Macháčková, Zbyněk Michálek, Eva Ogrocká, Helena Orálková, Kateřina Patíková, Jana Pokorná, Jan Přibyl, Martina Smolová, Pavel Ševčík, Josef Šilhavík, Eva Šteinigerová, Hana Švecová, Viliam Vateha.
In the years 2021-2022, the DL FF MU in the LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ project was transferred to a new platform in the faculty infrastructure Digitalia MUNI ARTS.