Reduced service, September 2026. The Institute remains open and its collections, card indexes and correspondence are in order, but it works at the minimum compatible with the care of the material and with obligations already entered into. The reading room opens on Wednesday and Thursday, 10.00–15.30 and by written appointment only; three posts stand vacant and may not be filled; no colloquium is being held this year; and three works are complete and unprinted for want of the printing budget. The reasons are set out under History of the Institute. These pages are revised twice a year, in March and September.

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Division III · Documentary editing Abteilung III — Editionswissenschaft

The division was established in 1961 and has two jobs: to make editions, and to settle the conventions by which they are made. Every editorial rule used by the Institute, the treatment of variants, the form of commentary and the making of indexes, is drafted here; the scholarly reading of manuscripts offered to the Institute is done here with the publications committee. Four people are in post, including the deputy director, who heads the division; the offices are rooms 2.02 to 2.04.

1. What the division works on

Editorial conventions

Conventions are matched to the material: a charter, an account book, a letter and a chronicle each need their own. The division's position is that the material governs the rule, and that no single set of conventions should be imposed on everything. Within one volume, however, the conventions may not be changed halfway; where a change is unavoidable it is explained in the preface, with the pages affected.

Variants and transmission

Where a text survives in several copies the variants are compared and the copies grouped by descent. The division is slow to declare a text established: where a variant cannot be decided, the readings are printed side by side and the editor does not choose between them.

Commentary and indexes

Commentary explains matters before words: persons, places, institutions, measures and coinage named in the text are annotated; linguistic notes are kept to what is necessary. Indexes are made in three series — persons, places and subjects — under the headings of the Institute's authority file, with cross-references from variant spellings.

Scholarly reading of submitted work

Manuscripts offered to the series or to the source booklets are read by two referees appointed by the division, one of whom must not belong to the Institute, and are then discussed by the publications committee. The reports and the author's replies are filed for twenty years.

2. Output

3. Projects in hand

4. The conventions in force

The fourth edition of the conventions is that of October 2016, printed as a supplement to Mitteilungen no. 45 (twenty-six pages) and obtainable separately from the academic office. The signs and the points of substance are these.

Besides the signs there are rules for numbers (roman numerals kept as in the original; arabic figures added by the editor in brackets), for dates (year, month, day; new style; church festivals kept as written and annotated), for measures and coinage (kept as written, with modern equivalents in the margin), and for names of persons and places (as in the original in the text, as in the authority file in the index, with cross-references where the two differ).

5. Publications

The Institute uses three kinds of publication and they are not interchangeable. The Mitteilungen is an annual volume, published since 1957 and yearly since 1962. The series holds book-length work. The source booklets are small collections of material. A result is sometimes circulated first as an offprint from the Mitteilungen and later absorbed into the series, which is why the same work can appear twice in a list; when citing, use the volume of the series.

6. Taking part in the editing work

About a third of the year's editorial work is done by people from outside the Institute. There are three ways in.

1. Transcribing to order. A charter is transcribed for the first time and difficulties are marked, and the work is paid by the item. It can be done at a distance, but the transcriber must first come for half a day's instruction in the conventions and sign an undertaking about the use of the material. Project WI-2024-07 expects to take on six to eight transcribers in 2025.
2. Editing a defined group of documents. A researcher proposes a body of material that fits the Institute's long-term work; if the division agrees, the work is entered in the Institute's list of projects and may be published in the series or in the source booklets. A one-page proposal is required first.
3. Making an index. Indexes are still wanted for four volumes published between 1968 and 1990, in particular an index of persons. The work needs patience and a working knowledge of the region's history.

Write to sekretariat [at] winddew.lab, marking the message "transcription", and say what you have studied, how much time you can give, and what Latin and Middle Low German you can read. The division replies within ten working days.