Expanding and Optimizing the Newspaper Portal of the German Digital Library („DDB Newspaper Portal V 2.0")

• Applicants: Matthias Razum; Barbara Schneider-Kempf; Frank Scholze; Katrin Stump, since 7/2022
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454852652

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 newspaper portal. This need, which has mainly been identified and substantiated via surveys in the Humanities, is to be addressed with the projects “DDB Newspaper Portal” and “DDB Newspaper Portal V. 2.0” . The main objective 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 newspaper 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 sourcesThe second phase will add the following features:- creation and export of individual newspaper corpora- more re-use options thanks to new search and harvesting interfaces - display of individual articlesIn the medium-term, the newspaper 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 funding line.The newspaper portal will emphasize connectivity and sustainability. The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) will play a central role and the newspaper 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)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte, until 7/2022