Digital Consolidation of Collections and Documentation of German-Language Periodicals from Eastern Europe. A Contribution to the Establishment of a Virtual Research Environment for East and Southeast European Studies

Project Manager: Tillmann Tegeler
Project Editor: Albert Weber
Project duration: 10/2012 – 9/2013 

The goal of this project, which is supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media following a resolution by the German Bundestag, is to supplement the historical newspapers and almanacs digitized as part of the previous project ‟German-Language Periodicals" with additional numbers and years that have so far been missing. Based on a wide network of cooperation partners in Germany and abroad, and in collaboration with the Regensburg University Library (UBR), among others, a total of 245,000 pages are being digitized and put online on the Digital Forum Central and East Europe, in the Digital Library of Romania, in the Digital Library of Slovenia and at Austrian Newspapers Online, the newspaper portal of the Austrian National Library. The digitization of larger, transregional newspapers primarily enables unrestricted access, independent of location, to a comprehensive, mostly complete corpus of sources in different digital libraries. The periodicals are particularly suited to access by scholars working on university theses aimed at attaining an academic qualification, but also for similar research projects. The selective, time-saving search for relevant keywords is enabled through full-text search functions (optical character recognition) throughout the entire digitized text. 

The second goal of the project is the development of a virtual research infrastructure. For this purpose, a bibliography on the online collection and a specialist bibliography on German-language periodicals from Eastern Europe are being created: all newspapers, journals and almanacs that have so far been bibliographically recorded are registered in alphabetical order and presented according to regions. Concurrently, the entire scholarly literature on German-language periodicals from Eastern Europe is listed in the specialist bibliography. Material that has already been digitized is directly referred to with hyperlinks in both bibliographies with the result that the latter also function as catalogs that represent the current state of digitization. Putting the bibliographies online enables their uncomplicated, continuous updating and, thus, their long-term use.

The third project goal is the creation of an online topography of 'orphaned' German-language collections in Eastern Europe: after the end of World War II, many library and archive collections of German minorities in Eastern Europe were removed from their original locations. The project aims to reconstruct these collections and analyze the mechanisms and motivations for their removal from the original library and archive environments of the state nations concerned. Those collections that have not yet been re-transferred to the stock of state institutions are also to be identified during research trips. In the context of this research the options for digitizing these collections will also be determined. Finally, the findings will be documented in a commentated online topography on the basis of a geographic map.

• List of Almanacs
• List of Newspapers

Blog posts on the project topic were published on Minorities Records.

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