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Type of site | Online database of Austrian culture |
|---|---|
| Available in | German, partly also English |
| URL | austria-forum.org |NID-Library |
| Commercial | no |
| Current status | Active |
Austria-Forum is a freely accessibleonline collection ofreference works onAustria inGerman, with some articles inEnglish,[1] initiated byTU Graz. As of 2022, Austria-Forum has been integrated with NID-Library (Netinteractive Document Library).[2]
The predecessor of Austria-Forum, the AEIOU project was launched in 1996 by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Science and Research as part of Austria's millennial celebrations. The first mention of the nameOstarrîchi, or Austria was in the year 996. The content was based on the German-languageÖsterreich-Lexikon, first published in a printed version in 1995. Additional material has been acquired, including additional images and audio and video files, allowingAEIOU to grow into one of the firstmultimediainformation systems pertaining to Austrian history, culture and politics.
The titleAEIOU—the "AnnotatableElectronicInteractiveOesterreichUniversal Information System"—is anallusion to the oldHabsburg motto,A.E.I.O.U. Suggestions for the improvements to articles can be made by reader; however, theaeiou Encyclopedia was not awiki.
Austria-Forum merged with a new technology, "Netinteractive Documents", which allows published texts to be annotated by readers, in NID-Library.com. The scope remains on issues of Austrian concern in a broad sense and includes open access versions of some key Austriaca publications, including historical primary texts, by e.g.Franz Grillparzer,[3] Gerald Szyszkowitz,[4] orÖdön von Horvath.[5] The collection includes recent secondary sources on Austriaca, such as Ute Degener's 2022 academic study onElfriede Jelinek's aesthetics,[6] Stefan Dollinger's 2021 monograph onStandard Austrian German,[7] or Kurt Ifkovitz's 2018 edition of Hermann Bahr's correspondence with Arthur Schnitzler, 1891-1931.[8]