The German Press in the “long” 19th Century – A Contribution to the Digitization of Weekly and Daily Newspapers from Berlin and the German East

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte, since 5/2022
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 443745941

In light of the outstanding quality of its holdings and its profound experience in newspaper digitization the Berlin State Library intends to provide a significant contribution to enabling access to Germany’s newspapers of the 19th century, a period which is crucial for the development of the modern press.The project aims at the digitization of 22 important daily and weekly newspapers, mainly published in Berlin, with a total of 2.7 million pages. All papers are, to a large extent, almost fully available on microfilms. Owning these almost complete holdings is both the result of the library’s unique position during the Wilhelmine Period and its role in the „Arbeitsgemeinschaft Sammlung Deutscher Drucke“ (working group to build a comprehensive collection of printed literature published in German-speaking countries from the beginning of letterpress printing) in which it is commissioned to acquire German newspapers published between 1801 and 1912.The selected newspapers, all having a long publication history, will be digitized starting with the year 1800 (or later years of first publication) and ending in 1920 (or earlier years of last publication). Optical character recognition will be applied to all digitized images.The newspapers were primarily chosen with a view on their representativeness for modern press in Germany and due to their potential for all types of historic and linguistic research and media studies.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Barbara Schneider-Kempf, until 5/2022