- Klaus M. Schmidt received his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1972 with his dissertation on the computer-assisted analysis of Ulrich von Liechtenstein's word material. This resulted in the first electronic foundations of the Middle High German conceptual dictionary, which at that time was still on punch cards.

- In 1992, two long-term projects were merged: “Names in German Literary Texts of the Middle Ages” by Dr. Horst P. Pütz at Christian Albrecht University in Kiel and the “Conceptual Dictionary of Middle High German Literature” by Prof. Dr. Klaus M. Schmidt at Bowling Green State University. Pütz integrated additional Middle High German texts and name annotations and expanded Schmidt's dictionary of terms. Since 1992, the project has been known as “MHDBDB” or “MHGCDB.”

- In 1995, the MHDBDB was made available online for the first time.

- In 1998, the system was transferred to a relational database from Oracle and given a new user interface.

- From 2002 to 2004, the MHDBDB was moved to the University of Salzburg, where it was further developed. The data was linked with larger partner projects.

- In 2017, part-of-speech (PoS) and lemma information was revised and presented in XML-TEI format.

- In 2022, the MHDBDB celebrated its 50th anniversary.

- In 2023, the alpha version of the completely restructured and migrated (graph) database was released. It was linked to standard data and linked open data via the Semantic Web. The database was released for open access in accordance with the FAIR principles. The ontology was published on GitHub.

More on the history of the MHDBDB: 

- Zeppezauer-Wachauer, Katharina (2022): 50 Years of the Middle High German Term Database (MHDBDB). An anniversary journey through time between punch cards, pixel dragons, relational databases, and graph data, in: Contributions to Medieval Narrative Research, Digital Medieval Studies. Perspectives of Digital Humanities for Old German Studies, Special Issue 12, 2022, pp. 161–186. [https://doi.org/10.25619/BmE20223203](https://doi.org/10.25619/BmE20223203)

- Hinkelmanns, Peter; Zeppezauer-Wachauer, Katharina. 2021. _Middle High German Term Database (MHDBDB)_. In: KONDE White Paper. Edited by Helmut W. Klug in collaboration with Selina Galka and Elisabeth Steiner in the HRSM project “Competence Network Digital Edition.” Accessed on: 7/19/2023. Handle: hdl.handle.net/11471/562.50.52. PID: o:konde.52

- Zeppezauer-Wachauer, Katharina (2022). The Middle High German Term Database (MHDBDB): Looking back on 50 years of digital medieval studies. In M. Bender, & J. Katharina (Eds.), Digital Research: Data - Tools - Methods (pp. 135-141). (Communications of the German Association of Germanists; Volume 2, No. 69). V&R Unipress. doi.org/10.14220/mdge.2022.69.2.135