An interdisciplinary scientific project Digitization, bibliographic description and research of texts written on Glagolitic, Croatian Cyrillic and Latin scripts until the end of 19th century in Zadar and Šibenik area (further Written heritage), is carried out at the University of Zadar in co-operation with Vestigia Manuscript Research Centre of University of Graz, Austria (Tomić, 2018). One of the project goals is to coordinate the interdisciplinary, cross-institutional research of Glagolitic script and culture by providing Virtual Research Environment (VRE), namely digital scholarly platform for research of Glagolitic script of Zadar provenance. The documents involved are multifarious and include epigraphic monuments, historical manuscripts, printed books, art objects, objects of everyday use, and other objects connected with Glagolitic script and culture. The variety of objects of research imply the variety of research disciplines and research methods involved in its research, majority of which are in humanities (linguistics, palaeography, codicology, epigraphy, history, bibliology, heritology, etc.). However, a number of other disciplines are, or should be, involved in research of Croatian Glagolitics in its transfer from traditional to digital research environment, ranging from social sciences to technical sciences (bibliography, information organization, sociology, data bases, data-mining).

In this paper, the methodology of designing VRE which is to support research activities of scholars researching Zadar Glagolitics will be demonstrated. The process of designing VRE is conducted in several phases. The first phase refers to research of usual research practices of scholars researching Zadar Glagolitics. The method used is structured interview with scholars. The practices are mapped to a set of “scholarly primitives” as defined by Blanke and Hedges, namely discovering, collecting, comparing, delivering and collaborating (Blanke, T., & Hedges, M. 2013). The aim of the that phase is to define the set of tasks which have to be transferred to VRE. Its transfer depends on several characteristics, such as the precision of its definition and the possibility of conducting the task in digital environment. Both will be tested with information scientists and practitioners.

The main challenges of the research is to design the VRE enabling interdisciplinary research and capable to address the specific research tasks of specialized scholars, as well as more generic ones. The system has to give the scholars opportunity to use specific digital tools in compliance to their research questions and methodologies, but also to bring them a step further – to accelerate their research by the use of digital tools and drive them at using new methodologies to answer the same or generate and answer new questions. Also, the VRE must be designed in such a way to persuade scholars used to traditional methods to use digital tools and research methods in Glagolitic script research within DH framework.