Digitisation of the historical newspaper editions of the ‘Lüneburgsche Anzeigen’ (1828-1944)

• Applicant: Danny Kolbe
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568125356

In addition to genealogical and local history research, the digitisation of the newspaper editions of the ‘Lüneburgsche Anzeigen’ is intended to support research into scientific desiderata in the regional and state history of northern Germany. The aim is to create unrestricted access for the interested public to the news and opinions of the time in a cultural and political-historical context. The comprehensive, digital representation of the former reception of political and economic events in the ‘Lüneburg Advertisements’ appears to be important. The provision of the digitised material in supra-regional portals and research systems serves the long-term goal of expanding the existing cooperation with other institutions and researchers. The integrated OCR word recognition system enables more effective searches through full-text searches. In addition, the aim is to make the generated content usable in an educational context. The intention is to address pupils and students from different educational institutions. The virtual availability of the ‘Lüneburg advertisements’ is intended to promote digital teaching through appropriate offerings, for example as part of research into topics relating to the Weimar Republic and National Socialism in the administrative district of Lüneburg. The work programme is based on the technical side of selecting and using suitable hardware and software. To this end, experience from previous digitisation projects can be used, such as that gained from the in-house digitisation of over 13,000 documents in the years 2018 to 2022. The bound newspaper editions vary greatly in terms of the number of individual pages. As a rule, a volume contains 153 issues and covers half a year; later newspaper volumes are available quarterly with 76 issues. In the early days of the ‘Lüneburgsche Anzeigen’ until around 1890, an issue contained 4 pages, later between 8 and 12 pages. Following an appraisal in the in-house restoration workshop, the newspaper volumes are to be digitised using existing scanning equipment. A Zeutschel OS Q0 overhead scanner will be used for this purpose. In the interests of conservation and image technology requirements, a DIN A1 book cradle and an attached book support will be used. The current version of the ‘Omniscan’ program (currently: 12.14 SR1) will be used for digitisation. Due to the lack of in-depth cataloguing of the "Lüneburgschen Anzeigen", selected basic data from the structural dataset and the DFG's basic dataset will be made available. The newspapers will be catalogued using the browser application ZDB WebCat. The digitisation intention will be published at the beginning of the project using this tool.

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