The ‘Digitale Diathek’ will provide its partners with comprehensive standard data on persons, places and locations for precise research and keywording. Links to recognized international thesaurus programmes such as the Getty Vocabulary Program at the Getty Research Institute, along with the comprehensive standard data editing programme at the Digital Slide Library, will give participating institutions unlimited access to constantly updated standard data in accordance with the highest possible scholarly standards. A helpful concordance to the relevant biographical and bibliographic reference works is being prepared.

The multiple-step editorial system in the ‘Digitale Diathek’’s standard data services allows distributed editorial supervision of the standard data thesauri available, by specialist scholars in the participating universities and research institutions, while at the same time allowing easy creation of new entries/supplementary data in the individual thesauri by “Digitale Diathek” partners participating in the standard data program me.

The instance-centred architecture of the ‘Digitale Diathek’’s standard data thesauri also provides the greatest possible freedom and scaleability in integrating the standard data into local instances and makes it possible to establish individual/local standard data holdings. Providing standard data thesauri locally ensures the greatest possible availability of the standard data, even if the connection with the standard data server fails.

The standard data service of the ‘Digitale Diathek’ started operating officially at the end of 2011.