GAMS Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System University of Graz

History and Founding

GAMS (Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System, or Humanities' Asset Management System) is a digital repository developed and operated by the Centre for Information Modelling—Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz, Austria. Development began in 2003 based on the open-source FEDORA Commons repository architecture from Cornell University. GAMS received CoreTrustSeal certification as a trusted digital repository in 2014 and is registered with the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data) and OpenDOAR.

Collections and Holdings

GAMS is an OAIS (Open Archival Information System)-compliant repository providing management, publication, and long-term archiving of digital humanities research data. It hosts over 50 data collections from the fields of humanities and cultural heritage, including digital scholarly editions, historical documents, linguistic data, and cultural heritage objects. Resources are assigned permanent identifiers and enriched with metadata. GAMS supports the full lifecycle of digital objects—from submission through archiving to public dissemination.

Notable Materials Related to Journalism and Media

While GAMS is primarily a humanities research data repository, it hosts digital editions of historical documents including newspapers, periodicals, and manuscripts of cultural and historical significance. The Dietrich Online collection, hosted via GAMS, provides bibliographic data for approximately 5 million articles from German-language journals and newspapers published between 1897 and 1944.

Access and Usage

GAMS is publicly accessible at gams.uni-graz.at. Open Access resources are available without registration. Institutions wishing to deposit data must enter a cooperation agreement with the Centre for Information Modelling. The default licence for hosted content is Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 where possible. The repository is operated by the Department of Digital Humanities at the University of Graz.