Das Projekt „Vorwärts bis 1933“

Digitalisierung und elektronische Repräsentation des sozialdemokratischen Zentralorgans

Abstract

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The paper deals with the digitization of a historical newspaper from the paper original to the web presentation using the example of the “Vorwärts - Berliner Volksblatt” (1891-1933). In a project spanning three years, the Library of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) digitized the corpus of 200,000 pages of the Social Democrats’ mouthpiece and made it available to the public. All editions of the “Vorwärts” up to its ban in 1933 are now accessible worldwide via a structured web presentation with full-text search based on optical character recognition (OCR). The project was completed on 31.12.2017. As part of a follow-up project, more social-democratic newspapers have been digitized since 01.01.2018 and made available within the portal “Historical Press of German Social-Democracy Online”, which was developed for the “Vorwärts”-digitization. The paper starts with information on the object and the motivation for the digitization, followed by a discussion of various aspects of the library’s scanning process, the electronic recognition of gothic fonts and metadata enrichment. Another focus is the presentation of the newspaper on the web and the search functionalities developed in the project. The blog accompanying the project is also covered. Here, articles with thematic connection to the historical “Vorwärts” were published and distributed via social media channels. The paper concludes with a brief outlook on the digitization project presented against the background of the recently published “Recommendations for the digitizing of historical newspapers in Germany (Master plan for newspaper digitization)”.