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

• Applicant: Dr. Reinhard Laube
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; History of Science
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 423398358

The cooperative project “Digitisation and Indexing of Printed Material Published in the 18th Century in the German-Speaking Areas (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 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 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 585,000 prints. 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). Duchess Anna Amalia Library plans to contribute a further 3,000 prints to the project.

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