VD 18: Digitization and indexing of 18th century books printed in the German speaking countries (VD 18)

• Applicant: Dr. Rupert Schaab
• Subject Area: Early Modern History
• Term: from 2014 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 262300393

The cooperative project "Digitization and lndexing of 18th Century Books Printed in German Speaking Countries (VD 18)" 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 digitized 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://dfq-viewer.de/en/regarding-the-projectl) as well as searching within chapter headings and figure captions.Thus, the VD 18 project ties in with the two chronologically preceding projects VD 16 and VD 17, which set up national bibliographies for the 16th and 17th century. The total holdings of the VD 18 amounts to approximately 565,000 prints, of which more than 110,000 have already been catalogued and digitized in the VD18 pilot project from 2009 to 2012. The digital items can be accessed via the VD18-Portal (http://vd18.de/), the union catalogues, OCLC's WorldCat (http://worldcat.org), the Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke (Central lnventory of Digitized Prints, www.zvdd.de), and the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library, http://ddb.de).Göttingen State and University Library plans to contribute 3,100 prints and 400 journals to the project during the first year of VD 18. ln addition to this, the library has taken over the management of the main phase of the project, thus sharing the responsibility for the coordination with the four other pilot-libraries, the head offices of the union catalogues, the National Periodicals Database (ZDB) and the DFG Head Office.

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