The project Medieval Serbian Charters Action (MeSeCA) – Towards a Digital Edition of the Royal Charters of Medieval Serbia aims at improvement of substantial, technical and software aspects of the digital database of Serbian medieval charters named Diplomatarium Serbicum Digitale (DSD) at the Department of Digital Humanities of the Graz University. The main objectives are to complete the database material, containing of edited document texts, metadata and images, and to conclude its transformation into a scholarly digital edition according to the current standards of Digital humanities.

The DSD database has been established at the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Belgrade in order to fill the void in the research left by the lack of a comprehensive edition of Serbian medieval charters. The documentary corpus in question comprises around 600 diplomatic units, 330 of which are issued by the rulers of Serbia from the late 12^th to the mid-15^th century. The charters and letters, originally written mostly in Old Serbian, and ca. 20% of them in Greek and Latin, are nowadays kept in various archives, almost all abroad. This material has been gradually processed as well as digitized and for the most part accessible online only until mid-2020, when the respective domain expired after the funding by the EU in frames of an international project had been concluded.

The future of the undertaking is now depending on the possibilities of the database’s digital transformation and continuing of the research work on editing texts and diplomatic analysis.

An opportunity for achieving those goals is given by the funding programme of the European Commission at the Department of Digital Humanities in Graz, which concretely means making a digital edition possible and solid performable, especially concerning application of XML standards, publication strategies and long-term archiving.