Digitisation of archival sources of the Federal Archives on colonial history, the Weimar republic and pre-war movies

• Applicant: Dr. Michael Hollmann
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 415316735

The project aims at the digitisation and online presentation of central archival sources related to German colonial history, to the history of the Weimar republic and to German film history. Thanks to the online presentation of the digitised material, researchers will have worldwide access to these sources at any time instead of being obliged to visit the reading room in order to analyse these sources. In addition to that, there won’t be any costs for the reproduction of the documents they are particularly interested in. Making accessible the Federal Archives’ sources and metadata within transregional research systems such as the Archives Portal Europe will further facilitate a search which is not limited to one particular institution. Finally, the online presentation of the archival sources offers the opportunity of easily reviewing or verifying references in scholarly works from anywhere in the world.The project’s core challenges are the digitising process itself, quality management, ingest of digitised data into the digital repository and the online presentation via the Federal Archives’ research system. Funding is only requested for the digitisation itself.The total amount of archival units to be digitised in the course of the project is approximately 54,000. That means that around 3.16 millions of digital images could be made easily accessible for research.

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