The repository is designed as a “living” digital framework that will continue to be supplemented and expanded: partially due to the large quantity, scope, and diversity of types and content of newly discovered material, and partially due to the possibility of finding new specimens of plays and program notes by the Ljubljana Jesuits. Namely, the inventories of some archives and libraries were promising for additional new findings, but during the research it turned out that these plays and program notes had been misplaced, lost, or transferred to some other institution of this sort. Changes in shelf numbers and possible relocations are very difficult to trace because in the majority of cases documentation about the transfer of material has not been preserved. Despite this, the search was not abandoned because some cases involve titles that are the same as those known from plays already discovered and preserved in their entirety. Finding yet another specimen with the same title but a different performance year would be informative about the Jesuits’ practice in staging a popular piece: whether they simply copied and relied on old material already used in order to learn the text and present it on stage, or whether they possibly reworked it and adapted it to the spirit of the time and new needs.

With the publication of primary material on the theater activity of the Jesuits in Ljubljana, the digital repository offers direct insight into an important period in theater in Slovenia. The preserved plays and program notes convey much more information about Jesuit performances in Ljubljana than can be gleaned from the Jesuit annals, diaries, and annual reports alone. The digital collection of the repository offers many new discoveries and facts that make possible further more detailed studies of this very diverse and broad area, and they also offer a wide range of opportunities for partial studies. Jesuit theater was active in Slovenian territory for 176 years, performances took place regularly, and they attracted broad strata of the population. An aesthetic sense for the theater and drama was gradually shaped in this way, and a firm basis was also created for the further development of Slovenian theater and general culture. Because Jesuit theater in Ljubljana was closely connected with the drama activity of other colleges, it established a close connection with contemporary European (Baroque) theater.

The digital repository of theater activity by the Ljubljana Jesuits offers many new discoveries and facts that redefine an important and relatively long period in Slovenian theater history. On this basis it will be possible to present the beginnings of Slovenian theater from the early seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century in a new light or from a completely different perspective. The publication of primary material and information in an open-access repository creates an opportunity for a direct comparison of Jesuit drama activity in Ljubljana with such activity at other colleges of the Jesuit order’s former Austrian Province and in the wider German-speaking area, and with the phenomenon of Jesuit theater in general.