2024-01-30 by Joachim Neubert
Up to January 2024, large parts of the digitized material of the ZBW’s 20th Century Press Achives have been hidden from public access due to intellectual property rights: Among the millions of digitized pages up to 1949, there exist a few articles (estimated less than 0,5 percent) were an author is named and this author died less than 70 years ago. Up to last year, this caused a check of the intellectual property status of every single document - often with the only result that the identity and the life data behind the name could not be determined. A change in European IPR law made it possible for cultural heritage institutions to publish archival units of out-of-commerce material - such as the digitized microfilms of PM20 - in toto.
Though access is limited to the EU legal area, the new regulation allowed to publish more than 3.5 million digitized images with more than 7 million pages on that part of the web. Material about small and large countries such as Denmark, China or the United states is now online, as well as large up-to-now missing parts about Germany. At least, the starting location of each country, and the topic at the start of subsequent films are provided. In a few cases - such as Denmark - the topics hierarchy is accessible in depth.
In a similar way, the wares archives have been prepared, with the starting point for every ware category (see, e.g., rubber or rocket motor. Finally, the [companies and institutions archives] (https://pm20.zbw.eu/folder/co/about.en.html) have been extended beyond Europe and a few selected areas - particularly US companies are included now.
New full-text search functionality
A large improvement to the site’s previous functionality is the addition of full-text search for companies. The implementation is quite special, in that it does not violate the overall architectural goal of the site - to be sustainable with as little maintenance effort as possible. The search function is outsourced to a service we created on Wikimedia Toolforge, https://pm20-search.toolforge.org. The tool executes a sparql query on Wikidata, addressing a full-text index maintained there. It makes use of all alias names from all languages entered in Wikidata, and in thus far exceeds simple full-text search (a capability even more welcome when searching the persons archives). So when you search for “Öffentliche Versicherungsanstalt Baden” or “ÖVA”, you will find the PM20 folder named “Öffentliche Lebensversicherungsanstalt Baden”. The result list directly links to the according PM20 folders, but also allows to exlore the Wikidata item which provides the links as well as matching phrases. Many of Wikidata’s alias names for companies, by the way, result from the data donation of ZBW to Wikidata - so it is great to see how cooperation and sharing can benefit both sides in formerly un-anticipated ways.
Back to the recent access extension: Determining the starting points of the topics on the digitized micofilm has been a tremendous effort, carried out as volunteer and community work, in large parts by a former ZBW employee. In order to continue that work and make the press archives better known within the community, a Wikipedia Projekt Pressearchiv has been created in the German Wikipedia. Encouragement and support are welcome!