Digitisation of collections and the development of standards – Holdings from colonial contexts at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (1800–1919)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Achim Bonte
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562189883

Against the backdrop of international global history research and driven by the digital humanities along with the most recent debates on restitution, new research on colonial history is now one of the most dynamic fields in the humanities, cultural studies and social sciences. Studies in this field are characterized by their methodological focus on global and entangled histories, which resonates strongly with the universal and multi-media collections of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB). In response to this research trend, the proposed project aims, firstly, to digitize and to make permanently publicly accessible around 10,000 monographs from colonial contexts from the SBB's holdings that were published between 1800 and 1919. This corpus includes predominantly publications in political science or ethnology as well as missionary and administrative literature from the perspective of the most consequential European colonial powers. The open access transformation with OCR-based full-text generation of this multilingual text corpus is intended to mark the start of further activities with which the SBB aims to make its exceptional collections of handwritten and printed works from colonial contexts available to researchers and Indigenous societies alike. In addition to its impact on research, the aim of this project is to contribute to a better understanding of the internal logic of libraries in the process of producing and organizing colonial knowledge by digitizing a systematically constructed historical collection segment. In order to increase the potential impact of possible follow-up projects and future digitization initiatives by other institutions, the SBB seeks - this is the second objective - to provide standardization impulses for an ethically responsible presentation of collections from colonial contexts. Specifically, this involves the development of a set of guidelines in coordination with the Working Group Koloniale Kontexte in Bibliotheken, in which recommendations for the implementation of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are to be formulated. On the other hand, these guidelines, which are also intended as a mosaic piece of the self-organized further development of the DFG-Guidelines Digitalisierung, is about opening up opportunities both for the equal contextualization of the digital copies produced and for the structured documentation of provenance data. Both objectives of this project are intended to result in the future design and development of a virtual research environment that is open in all usage and participation scenarios in order to provide researchers and Indigenous societies with central, research adequate access to digitized open access collections from colonial contexts.

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