ISSUES IN ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING ON THE MEDIEVAL SLAVIC AND BYZANTINE WORLD

This paper presents the experience gained in work on two current Bulgarian projects aiming at the development of electronic resources for South-East European Studies, Slavic studies, Old Church Slavic, and to some extent, Byzantine studies. The first project was launched within the framework of the Research Support Scheme of Open Society Institute/Higher Education Support Programme (HESP) of the Open Society Institute and started in July 1997. Its aim is to provide a multimedia CD-ROM entitled ‘Cyril and Methodius and the Early Medieval Slavic World: Byzantium and the Slavs in the 9 th century AD’. The second project aims at construction and maintenance of a specialised website “SCRIBE – Digitising Medieval Slavic Manuscripts in Bulgaria”. The Institute of Mathematics and Informatics and Open Society Fund in Sofia supported this endeavour in its initial steps in November 1997. During our real-life experience in the development of the projects our team encountered a large number of problems which could be of interest for our colleagues both in the field of Electronic Publishing and the above-mentioned historical and linguistic fields: •Subject area difficulties – these relate to the following issues: standardisation in the field of computer representation of non-Latin alphabets; lack of formal models of knowledge in the humanities; substantial variety in the scientific views of scholars on their object of study. •Organisational difficulties – these relate to lack of experience in organising projects in electronic publishing for the humanities in Bulgaria; legislative problems; economic problems in finding appropriate funding. Presentation of these difficulties and possible solutions will help colleagues, especially in the countries where electronic publishing is making its first steps in an economic situation similar to the Bulgarian one, to plan their work better and to make their movement to the information-rich society more efficient