Development Team
The Digital Indipetae Database was developed at Boston College Libraries in partnership with the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, and Emanuele Colombo of DePaul University.
The database was formally launched on March 26, 2020. The Libraries, the Institute, and Colombo first discussed a potential digital project in March 2016. At that time, the Libraries and the Institute were developing other online resources of curated, openly available scholarly materials, all to be searchable through the Portal to Jesuit Studies (learn more here).
The research interests shared by Colombo and his fellow scholars on the Jesuit petitions for missionary assignments -- or the indipetae -- fit well with the desire at the Institute and the Libraries to develop a suite of resources that merged digital and historical approaches to advance Jesuit Studies research. Colombo's plan to transcribe these letters and identify a standard set of metadata was perfectly suited for online delivery and would be enhanced by searchability and the ability to examine scans of the original artifacts along with the transcribed content and metadata. Thus, exciting scholarly research merged with technical expertise and infrastructure to create an online resource in keeping with the mission and aims of the Institute and the Libraries at Boston College.
The eight-month project to build the Digital Indipetae Database commenced in February 2019, with ongoing project design and planning addressing infrastructure, content, metadata, rights, and functionality. The Project Team implemented a customized Omeka site; created customized metadata fields that were appropriate for the materials; created transcriptions of digitized materials; developed a relational database to search, store and index data, provide backend/frontend access to content, data, and records; facilitated integration of the bibliographic dataset for searching via the Portal to Jesuit Studies; and allowed for collaborative data input and editing across multiple institutions. The database uses open source technology and features an Omeka Classic platform and Elasticsearch search engine developed for Omeka. All of the code used for this database is available in the Libraries' GitHub repository.
Project Leads
Seth Meehan, Associate Director, Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, Boston College
Kimberly Kowal, Associate University Librarian, Digital Initiatives & Services, Libraries, Boston College
Boston College Libraries Project Team
Ben Florin, Senior Library Applications Developer
Anna Kijas, Senior Digital Scholarship Librarian (Feb–Aug 2019)
Sarah Melton, Head of Digital Scholarship
Chris Houston-Ponchak, Web Applications Developer (Feb–Aug 2019)
Sarah DeLorme, Associate Digital Scholarship Librarian (Feb–May 2019)