VD 18: Digitisation and Indexing of Printed Material Published in the 18th Century in the German-Speaking Areas (VD 18)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfram Horstmann
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 288967813

The cooperative project Digitisation and Indexing of Printed Material Published in the 18th Century in the German-Speaking Areas (VD 18) aims at creating a retrospective German national bibliography of the 18th century. The project indexes German material printed between 1701 and 1800 and adds a unique VD18-identifier to each item. Furthermore, the printed material is going to be digitised within the project and will be made freely available on the internet. Adding detailed metadata of the document structure will facilitate navigating within the digital document (e.g. via the DFG-Viewer, http://dfg-viewer.de/en/regarding-the-project/) as well as searching within chapter headings and figure captions. Thus, the VD 18 project ties in with the two chronologically preceding projects VD 16 and VD 17, which set up national bibliographies for the 16th and 17th century . The total holdings of the VD 18 amounts to approximately 565,000 prints, of which more than 110,000 have already been catalogued and digitised in the VD18 pilot project from 2009 to 2012. In the current Section 1 of the main phase of the VD 18 project another 40,000 prints will be catalogued and digitised. The digital items can be accessed via the union catalogues, OCLCs WorldCat (http://worldcat.org), the Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke (Central Inventory of Digitised Prints, www.zvdd.de), and the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library, http://ddb.de). Göttingen State and University Library plans to contribute 8,000 prints to the project during the 2 main phase of VD 18. In addition to this, the library has taken over the management of the project, thus sharing the responsibility for the coordination with the four other pilot-libraries, the head offices of the union catalogues, the National Periodicals Database (ZDB) and the DFG Head Office.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)