Making Ethnological Research Available: Digitisation and Indexing of Periodicals, Series, Monographs and Dissertations from 215 Years

• Applicant: Professor Andreas Degkwitz, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441473601

Inspired by previous digitization activities in the Specialised Information Service Social- and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA) - e.g. projects for digitising the German anthropological journal literature - various institutions and persons approached the FID SKA with requests for further digitisation measures (among others the editors of the journal Curare and the series Berliner Blätter, the societies with their only partly and inadequately accessible newsletters, and a project that aims to use ethnological literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to clarify the provenances of human remains that had been collected on anthropological expeditions). In addition, the FID encountered further problems in the supraregional provision of historical and partly unique monographs, which made it necessary to think about different ways of delivery.Therefore, three groups of ethnological literature have been selected for digitisation in this project: 1. Ethnological journals, series of publications and newsletters containing mostly articles which, on the one hand, are made more widely accessible through digitisation, but which above all should be made better searchable through OCR and indexing. 2. Monographs that were published before 1920 and are not available for interlibrary loan at the UB of HU Berlin (and other institutions) due to preservation reasons. Through digitisation the large, well-preserved old monographs collection of the universitylibrary of the HU Berlin could provide younger and/or less wellequipped facilities in Germany and abroad with access to ethnological and historical comprehensive material. 3. Ethnological GDR dissertations, which are not available to the research community due to the lack of widespread publications could be made accessible for a larger readership for the first time.

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