DNB: Search. Find. Discover

Institution

German National Library (DNB)

Expertise implemented

Heritage Digitisation service
Digitisation at customer site

3.4 million pages to digitise
Copyright: German National Library, Stephan Jockel

Equipping the DNB with a digital collection

Through its ambitious digitisation programme, the German National Library aims to protect and preserve a multitude of original documents. The project will also provide a raft of new content for its online collections portal. Where copyright law permits, digital versions can be accessed in its reading rooms or from anywhere worldwide.

Digital images of printed works benefit from optical character recognition (OCR) processing to optimise future full-text searches. These digital versions are easily available to the DNB. This project is essential to the institution’s long-term strategy.

The “Bücherturm”

The 24,000 documents to be digitised are stored in the institution’s Bücherturm” or Book Tower in Leipzig.

Each document is taken from the shelf individually to be digitised in Arkhênum’s workshop on the library’s premises, before being returned to its original location.

Copyright: German National Library, Anne-Katrin Mettke

A project carried out on DNB premises

A 3-month test phase

Given the scale of the project and its strategic nature, it commenced with a testing phase. This phase focused on digitising 200 documents representing around 38,000 views. Once completed, the DNB validated the digitisation parameters and generated metadata, allowing the project to move to the production phase.

For this large-scale project, Arkhênum designed a tailored quality-control solution. DNB’s teams could remotely validate the images from Leipzig and Frankfurt and comment if necessary. The implementation of this process was drawn up in collaboration with DNB’s teams.

A stand-alone digitisation workshop

Arkhênum used its on-site digitisation expertise to establish a fully functioning, independent digitisation workshop within the institution’s Leipzig premises in record time.

No less than 5 people are deployed on site full-time. “With our team of 4 digitisation specialists, we’re confident that we will achieve both our qualitative and quantitative objectives within the given time frame.” confirms Robert Günther, Arkhênum’s on-site project manager. 

Highly diverse documents

The collections date from 1913 to the present day, requiring Arkhênum’s teams to handle documents in various formats, conditions and languages.

Some are also subject to restricted opening during digitisation to prevent further damage to their binding.

These documents are mainly in German mostly printed in “Fraktur” typography, i.e., German Gothic, which requires special character recognition which is within Arkhênum’s skill set.

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