Creation of a National Newspapers Portal on the Basis of the organisational and technical infrastructure of the German National Library (DDB) – „DDB Newspapers Portal“

• Applicants: Matthias Razum; Barbara Schneider-Kempf; Frank Scholze, since 2/2020; Katrin Stump, since 7/2022
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404633104

Germany is – and has always been – a country with a big and diverse range of newspapers. As a result, historic newspapers are an important source for scientific research in various academic fields and wide-ranging digitization (including OCR) and online presentation of historic newspapers is regarded as highly desirable by many stakeholders. These circumstances have been described in detail in a “masterplan”, submitted by a consortium of renowned libraries, leaders in the digitization efforts and participants of the DFG pilot project “Digitization of historic newspapers”. The masterplan includes guidance and criteria regarding the question which collections to select for digitisation but it also highlights the need for an easy and comprehensive access to digitized newspapers – for example via a national newspapers portal. This need, which has mainly been identified and substantiated via surveys in the Humanities, is to be addressed with the project “DDB Newspapers Portal”. The main objective of “DDB Newspapers Portal” is the development and launch of a portal based on the technological and organizational infrastructure of the Deutsche Digitiale Bibliothek (German Digital Library, DDB) which offers its users a comprehensive and easy-to-use access to digitized historic German newspapers.The first phase of the newspapers portal will offer at least the following features: - Full-text search across the digitized newspaper collections- Various browsing search functionalities- Integrated viewer- Persistent identifiers on journal and issue level, enabling consistent referencing and quoting of the digital sourcesIn the medium-term, the newspapers portal aims to provide access as described above to all holdings of digitized newspapers in German heritage institutions. For the time being, the emphasis will lie on historic, i.e. public domain objects held in libraries and other heritage institutions, confirming to the DFG’s projected funding line.The newspapers portal aims to offer a seamless user experience. Newspapers will be accessed in their entirety without leaving the portal, although it is partly based on distributed data storage. Long term operation of the newspapers portal will be ensured by its close connection to the DDB’s technological and organizational infrastructure.The newspapers portal will emphasize connectivity and sustainability. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) will play a central role and the newspapers portal will have tie-ins with the Zeitschriftendatenbank (German Union Catalogue of Serials, ZDB) and, in the medium term, Europeana Newspapers.

• DFG Programme: Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemalige Antragstellerinnen / Ehemalige Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte, from 8/2018 until 7/2022; Professor Dr. Thomas Bürger, until 7/2018; Dr. Elisabeth Niggemann, until 2/2020