Over 4,000 historical textbooks digitised
The Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI) is enabling free online access to over 4,000 historical textbooks at gei-digital.de.
The process of digitising the historic textbook collections started in 2009 and is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Over one million pages have now been digitised. The GEI-Digital internet platform (www.gei-digital.de) now provides free access to 4,300 German historical textbooks covering the subjects of history, geography, politics and natural sciences as well as including primers. The digitised textbooks span the period from the genesis of the national education system in the seventeenth century up to the end of the First World War in 1918. “Historical textbooks are something of a rarity; the goal of digitisation is therefore also to preserve these textbooks as objects of cultural value” said the head of the research library Dr Anke Hertling. GEI-Digital is not only of interest to academia, it is open to the public and everyone is free to look online to discover interesting and unusual books. The Mercurius Cosmicus is a geography book from 1648 and one of the oldest textbooks (further information: Mercurius Cosmicus). At the beginning of the twentieth century children were learning that Mount Kilimanjaro (also known as Kaiser-Wilhelm-Spitze) was, at 5,895m, the highest mountain in the German Empire. Accordingly colour images of the mountain frequently featured in German textbooks (further information: Kilimandscharo 1912)
Textbooks are an ideal resource from which to study social values systems, particularly in terms of social cohesion and the political legitimation of states. The digital textbook library GEI-Digital streamlines and facilitates academic research into textbooks. Full-text searches of the available texts enable individual terms to be quickly located within a great many textbooks. A zoom function provides more detailed views of source materials, which can be of great benefit when examining maps or illustrations for example. Data can also be exported and subsequently used to support new research concepts in the digital humanities.
GEI-Digital is a cooperation project. In addition to textbooks from the Georg Eckert Institute research library the project will incorporate collections from the German National Library (DNB), the Bavarian State Library (BSB) and the Research Library for the History of Education (BBF). GEI-Digital will be steadily expanded and will be developed as a central specialised portal for historical textbooks
- Attachment: Press release as PDF download (in German) and photo download
Contact at the Georg Eckert Institute
Catrin Schoneville
Press and public relations officer
Tel.: +49 (0)531 / 59099 -504
Email: schoneville@leibniz-gei.de
Contact details
Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research
Celler Straße 3
38114 Braunschweig
Germany
gei-digital@leibniz-gei.de (Project head: Dr Anke Hertling)
