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

The “Catalogue of Printed Material Published in the 18th Century in the German-Speaking Areas” (VD 18) aims at recording and indexing prints published between 1701 and 1800 in Germany or in German-speaking countries as cooperative national bibliography. The prints are not only catalogued but also digitised in order to create a digital library of 18th century German prints with high quality bibliographic data and digital reproductions, openly accessible for researchers and the general public. Research and navigation is simplified by standardised structural data within the collection and the individual titles.

The Collection of "Old Prints"  of the BBF | Research Library for the History of Education (BBF) contains more than 4,000 prints published in the 18th century. Within the first part of the project, 471 eighteenth-century volumes (which means about 109,000 scans) were catalogued, digitised and made openly accessible. The follow-up project will process another 128 volumes of the BBF with about 27,000 pages.

All titles are indexed in the VD18 database and the BBF library catalog. Directly from the database and the library catalog the digitised
reproductions can be accessed via link in the digital library of the BBF, Scripta Paedagogica Online (SPO). In SPO, browsing the "Collection of pedagogical imprints from the 18th century" is also possible.

The project was funded by the DFG (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).

• Vera Lautenschläger
• Sabine Liebmann
• Lars Müller
• Ulrike Voges