Leafing through hundreds of thousands of notarial documents is daunting for researchers and could wear out the age-old documents, so a ‘wikipedia’ of the archives is in the making.

Eventually, this online encyclopaedia could be linked to digital versions of the documents and researchers could access the deeds from home, instead of going to the archives in St Christopher Street, Valletta.

Charlene Ellul

Charlene Ellul, a former volunteer who developed a prototype of the ‘notarypedia’, said that, so far, research mainly focused on conservation and archiving issues rather than the content of the deeds.

The project is the result of a notarial archives’ sponsorship funding Ms Ellul’s MSC in artificial intelligence under the supervision of Charlie Abela and Joel Azzopardi.

The sponsorship could also fund further research through which Ms Ellul will make the ‘notarypedia’ more user-friendly and increase the links between one key word and another. On the present ‘notarypedia’ prototype, which is not yet online, a search for a particular notary could lead to information about a pearl necklace, for example.

Hopes other researchers would be open to crowdsourcing information

She hopes other researchers would be open to crowdsourcing information that would allow, among others, linking a plant mentioned in a deed for medicinal purposes to the actual site where it grows in Malta.

Just like in Wikipedia, photos can be included and text amended by researchers.

During her volunteering with the archives, Ms Ellul realised it was taking researchers a long time to look up information related to particular issues of interest such as fashion. “They would have to read through every single page and, apart from it being time-consuming, this method also increases handling of centuries-old documents,” she pointed out.

She said she had only come across similar research for Dutch text, so the ‘notarypedia’ could come in useful for European researchers, considering that Medieval Latin was widely used across the continent, including in Church records, among others.

This project could, therefore, put the notarial archives in Valletta on the map by disseminating its content online and, so, internationally, she added.

Dr Abela noted that, so far, the prototype was based on three already digitised volumes and the project had shown the potential of an approach that could be applied to any digitised document.

Ms Ellul has focused on text already transcribed by Stanley Fiorini. This consists of three of the oldest registers dating back to 1487, which include text in Medieval Latin, Maltese and Sicilian.

Interested researchers willing to take part in crowdsourc-ing can send a message on charlie.abela@um.edu.mt or charlene.ellul@um.edu.mt