Spines of early prints at Thurn und Taxis Hofbibliothek Regensburg (Foto: A. Genest)
Published annually from 1785 onwards until 1944 by Justus Perthes Publishing House in Gotha the Almanach de Gotha (Gothaischer genealogischer Hofkalender) was regarded as an authority in the classification of monarchies, ducal houses, families of former rulers, and royalty. The serial was revived in 1951 by Starke Publishing in Limburg (Western Germany) as Genealogisches Handbuch des Adels (GHdA). Rambow Genealogie provides a well-structured overview of digitized volumes that are available online free of charge: http://www.rambow.de/adelslexika.html
The Jewish collections departement at the Library of Johann Christian Senckenberg University in Frankfurt a. M. in cooperation with the Library of Germania Judaica in Cologne developed a fulltext database of Jewish periodicals, which are a rich source for research in the field of Judaism in the modern era. The virtual archive Compact Memory provides free access to 118 periodicals with 700000 digitized pages. The periodicals are listed alphabetically, related issues chronologically. Beyond that fulltext query is also possible.
The online database Berlin-Bibliography, which is provided by the Center of Berlin Studies at the Central and Regional Library Berlin, contains bibliographical references to literature (monographs and articles) about Berlin from 1985 onwards. Predecessors of this database are printed series, that were published in both parts of the divided city of Berlin:
[Unser] Berlin [Hauptstadt der DDR] in Buch und Zeitschrift / Stadtbibliothek Berlin
Berlin-Bibliographie / Historische Kommission zu Berlin
Historical adress books are an important reference for research in the field of regional, social and economic history as well as for genealogy. Libraries, archives and non profit-projects make these sources accessible for online use. We would like to draw attention to the Breslau Address Book from 1935, which is provided by the Silesian Digital Library. The address book contains a mercantile directory, lists of community facilities and all kinds of associations and organizations.
The Munich Digitisation Centre (MDZ) handles the digitisation and online publication of the cultural heritage preserved by the Bavarian State Library and by other institutions. It provides one of the largest and fastest growing digital collections in Germany.
The Digital Collections reflect the traditional special collection fields of the library: History, Classical Antiquity, Eastern Europe, Musicology. It comprises manuscripts, early prints, modern books, maps and photographic collections as well as journals and newspapers.
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.
