The project “SCRIPTA BULGARICA: Digital Library of Medieval Bulgarian Literature” financed by the National Science Fund (NSF) (contract No. ДФНИ-КО2/5 of 12.12.2014) is intended to create an electronic thesaurus of terms and library of Old Bulgarian texts (accessible through a special portal) integrating three main types of information:
a) terminology in the field of Palaeo-Slavistic studies – both in the existing scientific literature and in the successfully functioning digital corpuses. The project responds to the need for an easily accessible glossary of standardized terminology in several West European and Slavonic languages: English, German, Russian and Bulgarian, as well as their relevant terms in Old Bulgarian, Greek and Latin;
b) encyclopaedic articles about translated and original works outlining the most popular genres and genre forms in hagiography, homiletics, hymnography, chgronicles, narrative works and others;
c) transcribed texts from Slavonic manuscripts representing the translated literature from Byzantine Greek;
d) articles about the most frequently translated Byzantine authors (e.g. Gregory the Theologian, St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, Athanasius of Alexandria, Anastasios of Sinai, and Hesychius of Jerusalem, among others), whose works (genres and genre forms) modeled and formed Orthodox Christian written culture.
The portal was developed with the joint efforts of specialists from the Institute for Literature and Sofia University. It steps on the experience and materials accumulated as a result of several national and international projects of the Department of Medieval Bulgarian Literature at the Institute for Literature in the last ten years. These projects include a Repertorium of Old Bulgarian Literature and Letters (1995–2015) – within the framework of the international Repertorium initiative, launched by the Department, Petersburg which is its basic organisation. The international projects of the Department to create digital resources in Palaeo-Slavonic studies were implemented in partnership with the British Library (London) (1995-2012), the Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg (2004-2010), the universities of in Gothenburg and Uppsala (Sweden) (2008-2015), the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Institute of the Lithuanian Language in Vilnius, among others. The Department has a traditional partnership with Sofia University , both in the case of the Repertorium initative and in the development of the Slavica Sanctorum digital encyclopaedia.
As a result of these projects, digital resources were created and materials were collected which constitute a full text information corpus uniting linguistic, archeographic, paleographic, codicological and textological data.
The Scripta Bulgarica project also includes a unique for such initiatives in the humanities connection between the generated standardized apparatus for description, research, publication and translation of medieval texts with the keywords and the bibliographic descriptions. This allows the integration of the apparatus of scientific metadata in a uniform entity and the advanced stage of the project the development of an ontology of terms is relized.