Digitisation and Indexing of the Magazine of the German Book Trade (1834-1945)
– a cooperation between the Centre for Book Studies: Book Research – Publishing Economics – Digital Media at the LMU Munich, the Saxon State Library – State and University Library Dresden and the German National Library Leipzig
Academic Project Direction: Prof. Dr. Christine Haug
Digitisation and content indexing: Dr. Armin Bonte (Director of SLUB Dresden) and Dr. Julia Meyer (Project direction SLUB Dresden)
http://digital.slub-dresden.de/werkansicht/dlf/216090/
Dr. Stephanie Jacobs (Director of the German Book and Text Museum DBSM Leipzig), Dr. André Wendler and Dr. Ramon Voges (both at the DBSM Leipzig).
Project genesis:
The idea for a digitisation of specialist book trade magazines from the 18th to the 20th centuries and making them available to researchers arose from a period of research at the Austrian National Library in Vienna in 1997/1998, where countless specialist magazines from the Austrian book trade are kept – a sheer inexhaustible source for research into the book and publishing trade in Austria. This was directly followed by a systematic examination of the magazine database, which revealed up to 300 specialist editions for the publishing industry, the book trade, the paper and stationary trade, the railway station book trade etc.
In due time, the idea developed to attempt the digitisation and indexing of specialist book trade magazines within the framework of a large-scale project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Upon appointment to the Professorship for Book Studies as successor to Prof. Dr. Georg Jäger at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, this ambitious project was forced to take a back seat. Over the years, increasing numbers of specialist book trade magazines were converted into electronic form as part of the general digitisation of library collections. The Austrian National Library found its own methods of easily providing digital access to its magazine collections, and the book studies programme in Munich decided to focus on the Magazine of the German Book Trade from its inception up until 1945.
The digitisation of this specialist magazine alone, which contains an advertising section alongside editorial notes and mixes Fraktur and Antiqua scripts, is a technically extremely demanding task which threatened to derail the project on several occasions. A few months prior to the founding of the Centre for Book Studies: Book Research – Publishing Economics – Digital Media at the LMU Munich, this ambitious undertaking came together with the Saxon University and State Library Dresden and the German National Library, which became the starting point for a successful cooperation.
The SLUB Dresden, in close cooperation with the German Book and Text Museum Leipzig and the Centre for Book Studies in Munich, succeeded in digitising the Magazine for the German Book Trade (an almost complete collection of the printed edition was thankfully provided by the German National Library). The editions from all years on record will be available in electronic form by the end of 2019. The technically demanding digitisation of the magazine at the SLUB Dresden was flanked from the beginning by small academic workshops concerned with questions of content capturing, the depth of content capture, tagging and the creation of indices. The workshops have benefited from the expertise of individual members of the Historical Commission of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association.