About ARTOS

Project information for libraries

ARTOS is a central database of articles for research in the humanities and social sciences on Eastern and Southeastern Europe. ARTOS is part of the Specialised Information Service for East, Central and Southeast European Studies. The aim of the project is to bring together and further expand the existing indexing of articles in specialised libraries throughout Germany. For this purpose, cross-network indexing agreements are initiated between the participating libraries and the article data are brought together at a central location. With the help of (partially) automated indexing procedures, the elaborate cataloguing process is to be facilitated and an efficient search system developed in order to achieve the most consistent possible indexing depth of essay data.

The cooperative indexing of articles is coordinated by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. The collection point for essay data is the B3Kat, the joint cataloguing platform of the Bavarian Library Network (BVB) and the Cooperative Library Network Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV). The collected essay data are made available in the B3Kat as Open Data under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence for free use

The project at a glance

In principle, cooperation is open to all interested libraries at home and abroad. The amount of contributed essay data is irrelevant. We are interested in extensive data exchange but also in collaborating with a small number of continuously processed journals. Participation is also possible on an institutional or specialised bibliographical basis.

For libraries that belong to a German library network other than B3Kat, we organize data exchange between the network systems. Small libraries or foreign institutions that do not belong to any of the German library networks may also be considered for participation.

ARTOS is an Eastern European scholarly essay database for:

journal articles, contributions from anthologies, reviews,
preferably current and newer research literature, published after 1945,
preferably fully indexed journals and anthologies,
mainly international research literature on Eastern, Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe,
a limited amount of research literature from the countries of Eastern, Central Eastern and South Eastern Europe without reference to the region in terms of content.

Generally, articles from newspapers and news magazines are not considered.

The technical and regional profile of the essay database corresponds to the osmikon country and subject profile.

osmikon Country and Subject Profile

The shared standard is the RDA (Resource Description and Access) regulations. It is also desirable that indexing is consistent with the BSB classification (“BSB-DDC”), so that a browsing search function and a subscription service for newly indexed essays can be built up.

For the simple selection of data from the B3Kat, a joint project identifier will be assigned. In individual cases an automated allocation can be agreed upon. For partners outside the B3Kat, the project identifier will be assigned automatically when the data is imported into the B3Kat.

The advantages of cooperation

All participants are free to transfer article data into their research systems in addition to their own indexing services.

In the future, all participants will have the possibility to update their data records automatically with non-normalised keywords in currently up to eight languages (Ger, Eng, Fre, Ita, Est, Rom, Pol, Cze).

The provision of article data via osmikon.search allows for increased visibility and use of the essay data due to the high number of users (about 20,000 search queries per month). The attractiveness of the articles database will be further enhanced by a dedicated search interface with special subscription services for newly indexed articles and reviews.