Abstract
The project "Emblematica Online – Linked Open Emblem Data" set out to publish the Wolfenbüttel collection of emblem books as a resource for digital emblem studies. At the end we managed to publish information about approximately 12300 emblems and 220 emblem books.
After a short introduction into the field of digital emblem studies at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel the article presents the challenges we faced when working with XML encoded information that dates back to the beginnings of web and the infancy of today's Digital Humanities, the solutions we employed to tackle these problems and how we ended up implementing a publication pipeline implemented in XProc.
Some of the topics I like to discuss are missing documentation and schema validation, legacy technology (i.e. DTD), the creative use of XML specifications, and the benefits of XProc as a declarative language for XML processing pipelines that allowed us to quickly iterate possible solutions.