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 Thesaurus Professionum now contains about 23.000 entries for occupational titles found in Early Modern funeral sermons and similar texts in German libraries and archives.
Illustration: Amman, Jost, Sachs, Hans: Eygentliche Beschreibung aller Stände auff Erden, hoher und nidriger, geistlicher und weltlicher, aller Künsten, Handwercken und Händeln …
Durch d. weitberümpten Hans Sachsen gantz fleissig beschrieben u. in teutsche Reimen gefasset, Frankfurt am Mayn: Feyerabend 1568
thanks to http://www.digitalis.uni-koeln.de/
The transliteration of characters from non-Latin scripts differs from target language to target language and from purpose to purpose (literal/phonetic). The encoding of special characters that are used in these transliterations does as well.
The online-converter 2cyr.com now provides a tool for the automatic transliteration of languages written in Kyrillic to Latin script and vice versa. It is also possible to use an individually created transliteration for special needs.
For the lack of a common one-to-one encoding of characters within one transliteration system the machine-based conversion of bibliographic data is difficult. Nevertheless 2cyr.com is a useful instrument and with the help of a screen keyboard it is possible to make requests to Unicode-based library catalogues, bibliographical databases, search engines in general and paste the received information to the own reference management software.
individuelle Anpassung der Umschrift für jedes einzelne Zeichen
The collection mapping project Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände in Deutschland, Österreich und Europa (Fabian 1992, 1997) is now available on b2i, a research portal for the subjects of library, book and information sciences. The handbook provides information about libraries and collections mainly in Germany and Austria , furthermore in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Great Britain und Ireland. It is planned to extend the coverage to Switzerland and South Tyrol.
Current results in scientific research are particularly published and discussed in journals and anthologies.
Online catalogs of libraries very often do not contain bibliographical references to articles. The latter can be found in databases related to specific fields of research.
These databases mostly are not available online, but Litdok provided by the Herder-Institut Marburg is. Litdok contains bibliographical references to articles on the history of East Central Europe. A user interface
with the possibility to choose between ten languages and multilingual subject headings offer a comfortable search for literature in different languages.
The Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy offers reproductions of maps of the eastern regions that belong to Germany before 1918. Topograhic maps (1: 25 000,
1: 100 000) as well as general maps of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia (1: 300 000) can be purchased online.
The data base “historical place names” provides information about various different names of villages and cities in the past and about the affiliation of the settlements to administrative districts.
A shtetl (Yiddish: שטעטל) was typically a small town or village with a large Jewish population in pre-Holocaust Central and Eastern Europe. ShtetlSeeker is an online
feature hosted by the Jewish Gen Web site locating settlements in 31 countrys that are currently located in this region. It covers linguistic and historic variants for names. It is also possible to search by latitude and longitude to locate towns in close proximity and to display maps using links to MapQuest, Expedia, or MultiMap.
As tip of this month we recommend the following publication: “Biographisches
Handbuch der Rabbiner” [=Biographical Handbook of Rabbis] which refers to
Central Europe in the time between 1781 and 1871.
This handbook contains nearly 2000 single biographies of Rabbis with extensive and detailed references. The references are divided in :
1. archival references to biographies of the Rabbis
2. publications of the Rabbis
3. publications about the Rabbis
4. publications of the disciples of the Rabbis
A geographical index completes this remarkable and impressive edition. (Publisher’s announcement => English
