At the occasion of the upcoming “Tag der Archive” several German archives open their doors to the public on the first weekend in march (6-7 March 2010). This years motto is “In Search of Clues”.
But also on weekdays it is possible to visit guided tours and exibitions featuring treasures from their own collections.
OAIster provides access to free academic content like digitized books, articles, audio & video files, photographic images, theses and research papers. It has grown to become one of the world’s largest aggregations of records pointing to open archive collections with more than 23 million records contributed by over 1,100 institutions worldwide. OAIster was built by harvesting from open archive collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). From the beginning of 2002 to the end of October 2009 it was the benchmark OAI search engine project of the University of Michigan. In October 2009 OAIster’s records transitioned to the WorldCat database, which is operated by the semi-commercial library service OCLC. As of last week, an OAIster only interface is online and ready to use.
The “Biographical Portal” is a cooperative project of the Bavarian State Library, the Historical Committee at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and the Foundation Historical Dictionary of Switzerland. A joint index makes available the following biographical dictionaries:
In this way, more than 100,000 scholarly biographies of persons from all social backgrounds and nearly all periods of German, Austrian, and Swiss history may be accessed. Further national and regional biographical works of reference are planned for future inclusion in the portal.
Technical support: Nico Knoll
Foto: Wikimedia Commons, GNU-Licence , Author: OTFW
Berlin’s white-blue plaques commemorate a link between a certain location and a notable person or an event. The current scheme was founded in 1987, in the run-up to the 750th anniversary of Berlin. The plates are designed by Wieland Schütz and manufactured at the Royal Porcelain Manufactory (KPM). The white-blue plaques are financed from private resource while the Berlin Historical Commission acts as scientific advisory council of the programm.
In this year’s advent riddle we are looking for the name of a person, whose memorial plaque you find on top of this page in form of a jigsaw puzzle. By clicking the pieces of the puzzle next to the missing one you can change the order of the jigsaw pieces.
Please send your answer to buero@archivauskunft.de until January, 3rd 2010, 24.00 CET. The winners could choose between the following prizes:
Berlin Wall fragment at Bernauer Straße (Picture by A. Genest)
The image most people have of the Berlin Wall today is based on this view of its western face, covered in graffiti and drawings. From the East-German point of view, it was the last in a series of insurmountable obstacles, cordoned off and concealed from sight.
A new online documentation “Memorial Landscape of the Berlin Wall” is provided by the Dept. of Conservation at Brandenburg University of Technology that strives to fill in this gap between image and reality, a reality that has become history and is nearly not visible today in downtown Berlin.
The interactive map is going to be released also in an English version.
A new virtual academic bookstore/library has been founded: The platform, called PaperC.de, provides free access to academic texts and can be searched by key word, author, title or ISBN. Users can pay extra for certain services, like copying and pasting, printing pages, or marking certain passages. Those who purchase the publisher’s print editions have the opportunity to download and work with the online edition free of charge.
Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as medium of scholarly exchange and as liturgical language of the Roman Catholic Church, but also as language of science, literature, law, and administration. Therefore Latin-skills are the basic premise to read and understand a wide range of sources from this period of time. We would like to draw your attention to two tutorials created by experts from the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland National Archives that provide help to improve reading skills in Medieval Latin by translating sentences taken from real documents held at The National Archives.
12 basic lessons: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latin/beginners
12 advanced lessons: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/latin/advanced
Officially launched July 17, the new social networking site GenealogyWise already has shown rapid growth of members and interesting content.
The ability to create groups, start forum discussions and invite friends provides the structure for users to communicate topics like surname studies and specific locations, European, African, Asian or Jewish ancestry, proof standards, software and computer problems.
One can leave comments, embed Twitter feeds and blog posts, upload and share genealogy-related documents, podcasts, fotos and videos.
When Poland regained its independence in 1918 it faced a challenge of making a new set of maps for a new country. Its first task was to form a coherent and updated system from the maps of Polish territory originally drawn by the partitioning powers (German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires). By 1939 all 482 sheets for the area of pre-war Poland were published, together with around 280 additional sheets (”wyłącznie do użytku służbowego” or “for internal use only”) to cover the adjacent areas of neighbouring countries, i.e. USSR, Lithuania, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. Nowadays these maps are a source of information about pre-WW2 Poland. They can be used e.g. to locate villages which have long disappeared from the ground or to find former names of streets and buildings on historical city maps.
A private, non-profit projekt provides free online access to scanned maps and other materials published and owned by the “WIG” (Wojskowy Instytut Geograficzny).
New York. Ellis Island. Immigrants walking across pier from bridge. National Photo Company Collection No. 3163E (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)
Census and immigration records often show the short label “Posen” as the place of origin for German, Jewish and Polish immigrants. The Poznan Marriage Indexing Project helps descendants of those who left the Poznan area in the 19th century to identify the actual town or parish their ancestors left when departing for America, Australia or elsewhere. The period between 1835-1884 corresponds to the period of greatest emigration.
The database is located at:
http://bindweed.man.poznan.pl/posen/search.php
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