On Monday, while I was on Mondays with Myrt I got an Email reporting a new and interesting source for me.
The German Digital Library, a joint project of the federal, state and local governments, now also has its own newspaper archive online, making 247 newspapers, 591,837 newspaper issues and a total of 4,464,846 newspaper pages from nine libraries available completely free of charge, indexed and searchable right from the start in October 2021.
This Digital Library could solve big problems researching German Newspapers as these sadly aren’t always digitalized in the first place, not in one place searchable (as of now) and often under such hard protection by their respective publishers that even Libraries have problems getting them on hold.
The Navigation is very easy as they seem to be inspired by Newspapers.com
Sadly, there are still some problems that I want to make you aware of: It takes a long time to index everything, so the Hold is (while still a lot in numbers) a fracture of the total. The Bigger problem (especially for foreigners) is that while you can search for places of circulation these don’t register local regions but just the places by name. So for example it assumes someone from Potsdam wouldn’t read the News from Berlin, which is the next bigger city (they even share borders with each other).
To solve both problems you have sadly one real alternative: the ZDK!
The online German Union Catalogue of Serials (ZDK). This is a Catalogue of every Newspaper, Magazin and Serials available in german Libraries (including state archives and Universities). Just think about Worldcat but specialized for Newspapers.
While it doesn’t have indexed Papers, it can help you in a more traditional way, showing you when and where a Paper was around and if there are still hold of the paper in a Library. The Best thing? It lists if these Papers are in a document delivery program so you get them as a copy or even scanned and send via Email.
This is done by Paper and not by Library because some Papers are only held to be viewable on the spot (due to copyright, their age, or other reasons)!
Be aware that the ZDK also doesn’t know distributional regions but just Placenames.
Germany is still on a long way to having something like Newspapers.com but at least it is a start. Let’s use the tools as often as we can to show the ones in charge that we need them!
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