Digital Text Repository for Older Estonian Literature

EEVA: Digital Text Repository for Older Estonian Literature

Digital Text Repository for Older Estonian Literature EEVA is a joint project of the University of Tartu Library and the Institute of Cultural Research of the University of Tartu, partnered also by the Estonian Literary Museum.

The main goal of EEVA is to make the old rare texts that have played an important role in Estonian cultural history accessible to the users in the most sparing way that would not harm the original copies.

EEVA is, foremost, a collection of texts, containing texts starting from the 13th century up to the beginning of the 20th century.

In case of the first rare examples of Estonian-language literature, EEVA always strives to show their context. The text corpus has been compiled on the geographical and cultural principle, based on the notion that the earlier Baltic literary culture was multilingual; in Estonia, it was primarily in the German and Estonian languages. Therefore, EEVA contains texts in Estonian, German, Russian, French, Latin, Greek, and naturally, in Latvian, trying to contribute to the comparative study of the multilingual Baltic cultural space.

EEVA has two axial terms – text and author. The primary unit of EEVA is the text, which is surrounded by a network of information, containing referrals to secondary literature, an overview of the author’s life and work complemented, when possible, with the author’s portrait and illustrations from the text. The texts and authors are interlinked with related texts and authors inside EEVA and when possible, also with other related web pages outside EEVA.

EEVA is also a virtual literary history. Its user is assisted by a constantly growing index of headwords, specifying the texts according to the subject field, main type, genre, movement, time period, etc.

EEVA is linked to the joint catalogue ESTER of Estonian research libraries via the call number information.