| When | November 17th, 2008, 10am |
|---|---|
| Where | National Central Library |
| Genre | Seminars & Lectures |
| Program | Preserving the Past |
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Dr Thomas Stäcker, head of the 'Alte Drucke und Digitalisierung' (prints and digitalization) department at the Duke August Library in Wolfenbüttel will speak, on November 17th, 2008, at the National Central Library about the Digitization of the German Cultural Heritage. Abstract Preserving the Past – Towards the Digitization of the German Cultural Heritage In the course of the last years the Duke August Library in Wolfenbuettel, one of the leading independent research centers for the early modern period in Germany, has undertaken various activities to enhance access to source material by putting digitized manuscripts and imprints on the web and indexing the structural information they contain. As a member of the German decentral national library and funded by the German Research Foundation it has begun to digitize vast amounts of source materials, above all from the 17th century. The overall aim is to digitize all copyright-free imprints from the German-speaking area. The paper will focus on the manifold challenges related to this process. Vast quantities of precious source materials are to be digitized while respecting and fulfilling the high preservational standards maintained by the library. The master files created in these processes amount to dozens of terabyte which have to be adequately stored. Not only are there long-term archival problems to be solved, but persistent accessibility must also be provided. The challenges of the immediate future will be to coordinate the various efforts by libraries and other cultural heritage institutions in order to establish joint databases for digitized materials in Germany and to strengthen the collaboration of the different players in a global research community so that they collect and share resources on the web via well-defined XML interfaces. Dr. Thomas Stäcker (Duke August Library in Wolfenbuettel) |
| Links |
Duke August Library in Wolfenbuettel |