Digitization of the juridical texts of the Desbillons collection

• Applicant: Dr. Sabine Gehrlein, since 9/2017
• Term: from 2015 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 278590900

Mannheim University Library applies for the digitization of 800 law historical titles from the Debillons collection. The selection comprises all subjects of Ancien Droit and is representative for a contemporary collection. The collection originates from the Jesuit pater and academic François-Joseph Terrasse Desbillons (1711-1789). Following the suppression of the Jesuits in France, Desbillons immigrated to Mannheim. He brought his enormous private library with him, which now belongs to Mannheim University Library. The selected titles are important sources for the history of French law of the 17th and 18th centuries and are the textual base of the proposal ¿Grundbegriffe des ancien droit: Computerlinguistische Impulse für eine Erneuerung der Begriffsgeschichte¿ which is submitted to DFG simultaneously. The OCR generated full texts will be analysed with computer linguistic methods and the historical terms will be extracted. Applicant will use the software Goobi for the handling of the digitization workflow comprising all processes from storing the scans to creating the metadata to the publication of the digital texts in WWW. This software - developed with financial support by DFG and freely available due to an open-source license - is an important component for a sustainable digitization infrastructure at Mannheim University Library. No funding of license costs will be necessary.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Christian Benz, until 9/2017