Partners Involved

All partners

General Objectives

To concentrate efforts, efficiently transmit and exchange information within the network and to disseminate new technologies for information collection and retrieval to the outside scientific community, the program opted from the onset for strong technical and methodological integration, structured around the networking and distribution of accumulated knowledge. The transversal WP7 was aimed, therefore, at the development of a central online information system and internet portal for justice resources Just-His.be (Just[ice]-Historical Information Systems). The objective put forward was to ensure, via a single and centralized access, the management of all information related to the IAP project and its execution, as well as the diffusion of knowledge on the history of Belgian justice.

Just-His.be was meant to perform several functions at the same time:

• to provide a tool for the valorization of the project,
• to support the daily operation of the network,
• to constitute a research instrument that truly aggregated the resources accumulated by the network members.

Workprogramme

Development of the Just-His.be portal

The work carried out within WP7 covered a broad range of activities concerning the design, development and implementation of the Just-His.be portal’s modules on the one hand, and the collection, structured input and management of content on the other. The architecture of the portal and the information it provided were developed in order to answer two needs:

• First, the management of all information relating to the entire IAP project: this concerned external communication of the structure, the objectives, the scientific activities and the output of the IAP project , as well as internal exchange of information through an intranet-extranet.
• Second, and most importantly, the ©portal was elaborated to provide online access for the scientific community to digital resources and databases offering useful sources and data for the study of the sociopolitical history of justice in Belgium. It therefore integrated a Research Repository with digitized archival and other sources and bibliographical references for Belgium justice history; a database with prosopographic information about Belgian magistrates (judicial biographies, see also WP4); a database with the Belgian judicial statistics ("Quetelet.net").

The daily work on the different components of the Just-His.be portal, both on the level of technical support and maintenance, and that of the structuring and input of content, was carried out by Dr. Jonas Campion of the UCL team, as a part-time collaborator on the IAP project. His activities were coordinated and supplemented by Dr. Aurore François of the UCL team, who as a historian and informatician brought in particular IT and scientific expertise, which she combined with a full-time mandate of chargée de recherches of the Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS).

Dr. Frédéric Vesentini of the UCL team coordinated the collaboration between the IAP project and its Just-His.be portal on the one hand, and the Quetelet.net project on the other, which was aimed at the development of an application providing online access to the Belgian Judicial Statistics published since 1830. With the support of a new INSTAP project (Federal Science Policy Office, AGORA program, second phase in October 2010), this database was further developed on the technical level and further completed through the encoding of additional judicial statistics, in order to attain coverage of the entire period from 1795 up to 2008.

Collection and digitization of archival and other sources for the history of justice in Belgium

In order to realize the input of a corpus of digitized source material into the Just-His.be Research Repository, all partners involved in the IAP network undertook efforts for the retrieval, collection, inventorying, digitization and other preparatory treatment of archival and documentary sources. Priority was given to the preservation and digitization of mostly unaccessible or disappearing judicial source material, both unpublished and published.

The current network has decided to adapt the Just-His.be portal to improve its visibility and use. Special efforts were made in terms of design and the website’s architecture. And so Just-His.be turned into Bejust.be...