Digitisation of historical newspapers of the German speaking countries: The North German key medium Hamburger Fremdenblatt 1863 – 1945

• Applicant: Professor Robert Zepf, since 3/2020
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422609542

During its first four decades the Hamburger Fremdenblatt emerged as the daily newspaper in Hamburg with the highest circulation, and it proved to be one of the papers widely taken notice of. Weekly English and Spanish editions made it also well-known abroad. At the end of the Weimar Republic the Fremdenblatt had a circulation of about 150.000 copies and was one of the prevalent German newspapers, seminal and important as an opionon-leader especially for Northern Germany. In 1911 a rotogravure supplement was an innovative feature, which was added daily from 1912 onwards. Digitising the Hamburger Fremdenblatt and generating machine-readable full text has been urgently required by political as well as cultural historians for many years now.Thus, the typological spectrum of big Hamburg newspapers will be completed online, reaching from various bourgeois-liberal and conservative papers to those of leftist and rightist political parties. Comparative historical research will be markedly facilitated, and an extensive new full text and picture archive will be made available. Roughly 450.000 newspaper pages are to be digitised and OCRed to full text in this project. They will be accessible via union catalogues such as the North German GVK and the Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB), the union catalogue of serials, and they are to be provided – via an OAI-PMH interface – in ZVDD, in the German Digital Library (DDB) and Europeana as well as in the local newspaper portal.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Petra Blödorn-Meyer, until 3/2020