Historical German textbooks are made directly available to academia and the public
The project is thus for the first time rendering a unique stock of sources available to research and a wider public. It forms an ideal basis for studies on social values with a view to social cohesion and political legitimacy on the part of states. As textbooks play a key role in evolving nation-states as instruments of state memory policy and identity building, history textbooks from the period of German Imperialism will be digitalised during the first phase of the project.
The Centre for Retrospective Digitisation, Göttingen, and the library of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information (DIPF) have worked together with the GEI to achieve this project. All images contained in the textbooks are being incorporated into the DIPF’s digital images archive. The Herzog August Library at Wolfenbüttel and the University Library of Augsburg have also been involved in the project. Technical support was provided by the Gauß IT Center of the TU Braunschweig in line with the cooperation agreement between our two institutions, and also from the MIK Centre, Berlin, where the textbooks were scanned. The open-source system ‘Goobi’ will be used as the digitisation platform, to which the GEI was given a valuable introduction by the Göttingen-based enterprise Intranda. Such an ambitious undertaking would not have been possible without these excellent regional and transregional networks.
‘With GEI-Digital we have succeeded in producing a user-friendly information system that will now quickly be filled with content within a pleasingly short period of time”, reports Robert Strötgen, the technical project manager of GEI Digital. ‘The first few books available from the beginning will turn into thousands over the course of the various project phases’.
Professor Eckhardt Fuchs, deputy direct of the GEI, is equally satisfied: ‘With GEI-Digital we are rendering an important resource directly available from the desktop to international textbook research, teaching, and a wider public’.
GEI-Digital online: http://www.gei-digital.de/
