German-Language Periodicals from Central and East Europe. The Virtual Consolidation of Scattered Collections

Project Manager:Tillmann Tegeler
Project Editor:Albert Weber
Project duration: 7/2011–6/2012

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 enable access, independent of location, to newspapers and almanacs that form the essential sources for historical and cultural studies on Central and East Europe. For this purpose, selected collections of German-language periodicals from the 19th and early 20th centuries from the library of the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European studies will be digitized by the University of Regensburg, thus making them searchable by means of text recognition. Finally, the digital copies will be offered for free use in the Digital Forum Central and East Europe, the portal for historical German-language periodicals in Central and East Europe. Since hardly any newspaper is available in its entirety in a single library, a further task is the consolidation of collections. The employment of a research fellow  for the coordination of follow-up projects emphasizes the sustainability of the project. The research fellow will create a network of libraries within Germany and Eastern Europe that are expected to consolidate their collections virtually in the future. After the completion of the project, around 95,000 newspaper sheets will be available as sources on the history of Germans in Central and East Europe. This material will, among other purposes, be suitable for scholars working on university theses aimed at attaining an academic qualification, but also for similar research projects. Its particular value lies in the full-text search that enables the selective detection of research-relevant keywords.

• List of Newspapers
• List of Almanacs

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

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