Digitisation of historical newspapers of the German speaking countries: Enlightenment newspapers from Hamburg and Altona and their continuation in the 19th century

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In early modern times Hamburg and Altona were among the most important centres of the newspaper business in the German speaking countries and central points of enlightenment in Northern Germany. The Bremen State and University Library comprehensively digitised the German press of the 17th century. Subsequently the SUB Hamburg aims at providing full text of the four most important political newspapers of Northern Germany in the 18th century: the Staats- und gelehrte Zeitung des Hamburgischen unpartheyischen Correspondenten – later: Hamburgische r Correspondent –, Hamburger Relations-Courier, Altonaischer Mercurius and Reichs-Post-Reuter. All of them contributed to conditioning and inspiring the enlightenment movement in Hamburg and Altona with a special political and economic spirit. They had widespread influence in the German Empire and Denmark. Their digitisation provides a broad new material basis for enlightenment research in respect of politics or economics, language, culture or communication.The Correspondent was published until 1934, merged with Hamburger Börsen-Halle since 1905; it was digitised by SUB Hamburg earlier and is now to be OCRed in order to generate full text up to 1904 as has already been done for 1905-1934. The Altonaische Mercurius (1839-1875: Altonaer Mercur) remained a well respected regional newspaper north of Hamburg until 1875. Both papers represent „the turn from a nationwide or supraregional quality paper to a local newspaper which is characteristic of the German history of the press in the 19th century.“ (Jürgen Wilke)Roughly 512.000 newspaper pages are to be digitised and OCRed in this project, and additionally 463.000 pages of the already scanned Correspondent will be transformed into full text. They will be accessible via union catalogues such as the North German GVK and the Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB), the union catalogue of serials, and they are to be provided – via an OAI-PMH interface – in ZVDD, in the German Digital Library (DDB) and Europeana as well as in the local newspaper portal.