Digitisation and Indexing of Printed Material Published in the 18th Century in the German-Speaking Areas (VD18)

• Applicant: Dr. Yong-Mi Rauch
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2021 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 458354547

The cooperative project “Digitisation and Indexing of Printed Material Published in the 18th Century in the German-Speaking Areas (VD18)” 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 VD16 and VD17, which set up national bibliographies for the 16th and 17th century. The total holdings of the VD18 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 VD18 project another 40.000 prints will be catalogued and digitised. The digital items can be accessed via the union catalogues, OCLC’s 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).The Library of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin plans to contribute 450 volumes to the VD18-project as co-operation partner. This is its second application within this project.

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