
At the end of 2023, Croatiae auctores Latini, a digital collection of Latin texts connected with Croatia, received a (long overdue) update, 15 years after it was launched, ten years after the last update. A number of new texts were added (by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Paulus Paladinus, Ilija Crijević, Ioannes Rosanus) and many small corrections included. At the moment the collection comprises 509 TEI XML documents with 5,674,274 words in texts (metadata and encodings are not counted). The TEI XML sources are available on Zenodo, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.10456561.
But, even more important, a new experimental search infrastructure can be accessed at the address croala.ffzg.unizg.hr/cdb/index.
The new search interface was designed on top of an instance of the BaseX XML database, using XQuery scripts and a minimal CSS framework Chota.
There were three goals: to keep the search as simple as possible and adapted to the needs of most of CroALa users; to harness the expressive power of TEI XML; to provide texts for reading as well.
The interface is experimental and done by a nonprofessional programmer. After exploring several currently available other choices for publishing XML, however, we either were not able to get the (sometimes beautiful) software working on our server, or were not satisfied with the results — which had to be adjusted and tweaked almost as the current solution.
By the way, updated information, including the ISBN, was also added to the metadata on the CroALa landing page, making it easier and nicer to save in Zotero bibliographical software (we used the Google/Highwire key-value system).
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Neven Jovanović (January 28, 2024). Updates to CroALa: new texts, new search interface. Croatica et Tyrolensia. Retrieved May 15, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/vorm