Zeitungsdigitalisierung: eine neue Herausforderung für die ULB Halle: Werkstattbericht aus der Pilotphase des DFG-Projekts „Digitalisierung historischer Zeitungen

Newspaper digitization and an appropriate presentation on the internet is still a challenge in Germany, where the production and distribution of newspapers have a long and distinctive tradition. The article presents the current findings of a newspaper digitization project that is being carried out at Halle University and State library. The project is part of a Pilot phase of newspaper digitization supported by the German Research Foundation, in which various German libraries are cooperating, each with its own task and technical approach. The project in Halle focuses on the digitization of the newspaper Hallisches Tageblatt, which was founded in the end of the 18th century and ceased publication in 1892. The article describes methods and results of an OCR test for Gothic (Fraktur) printing types and structural indexing. It also deals with the investigation of opportunities for establishing routines of persistent addressing of periodicals and excerpts from them in order to enable and facilitate reliable and long-term valid digital citation practices for the academic community. This part of the project is being realized in collaboration with the German National Library. The procedures are based on Uniform Resource Names (URNs), which perform as Persistent Identifiers. The application of URNs for periodicals is an extended version of the harvesting routines of URN Granular, which have already been implemented successfully for monographs.