From bookcase to screen. Digitizing the funeral sermons of the Skokloster castle library

Funeral sermons are a valuable source for understanding life in early modern Europe. They deal with sorrow, consolation and faith, with social status and relations, health, work and education.

The project aims to digitize a collection of 1,046 printed sermons from the 17th and 18th centuries that belongs to the Skokloster Castle library and to make it available for research.

The material raises questions about life and death and how people coped with revolutionary events such as war and peace, traumas or environmental disasters.

The fact that almost half of the sermons concern women – who are otherwise strongly underrepresented in the archives – makes the collection particularly relevant for research.

The collection belongs to a European cultural heritage; the sermons are written in Swedish, German, Latin, French and Danish, which stresses the urgency to make them available also to international scholars.

In accordance with the FAIR principles, the digitization comprises detailed cataloging, digital reproduction, OCR conversion to machine-readable files and publication. Catalog entries are created with linked open data in the National Historical Museums’ collection management system.

Both image and text files are added to the entries that are linked to LIBRIS, delivered to SOCH and connected with other databases internationally.

The project significantly improves the availability and usability of the collection and pave the way for new kinds of research and digital methods.