Virtuelles Deutsches Urkundennetzwerk (VdU) was a DFG-funded project (2011-2013) to build up a Virtual Research Environment for the handling of medieval charters.
About 20.000 charters from 12 German archives contained in 35 archival fonds were scanned during the project phase and were enriched with metadata. HKI Cologne developed a set of collaborative tools for the edition and analysis of these charter collections.
In addition, a collection of 138 different cartularies from different regions of Europe were made available in cooperation with Google. The cartualries have been digitized and OCR-scanned by Google. HKI Cologne developed automatic recognition tools to analyse the structure of the digitized cartularies, including signatures, abstracts, date and place of issuing, transcriptions, person names, place names, and so on. The automatically structured content could then be transcoded into a standardized TEI/XML format.
As of November 30th 2013, both, the content created, as well as the software tools developed have been transfered completely into the larger project Monasterium.net.
All results and documentation of the VdU project is available here: https://github.com/HKIKoeln/MOM-CA