District archive presents data worldwide
Following the megatrend of digitisation, German cultural and scientific institutions are networking via the joint platform Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB), making their collections accessible to the public worldwide free of charge. "The Enzkreis is now the second administrative district in Baden-Württemberg to participate in this virtual library by presenting indexing data. With more than 42,000 deposited objects, it occupies third place nationwide after the district archives of Gießen and Stormarn," says District Administrator Bastian Rosenau happily.
The aim of the DDB is to give everyone free access to Germany's cultural and scientific heritage via the Internet, i.e. to millions of books, archival materials, pictures, pieces of music, films and sheet music. As a central national portal, the DDB is intended in the long term to link the digital offerings of all German cultural and scientific institutions with each other and fundamentally improve the research possibilities for scientists, historians, family researchers, journalists, students, pupils and teachers.
"Popular search engines often provide too many, too undifferentiated references - or too few. Whereas previously you had to laboriously browse through various library catalogues and the research systems of the individual archives, now you can get all the hits at once with just one search query," says Konstantin Huber, head of the district archive, describing the advantages of the DDB, which is to be integrated at European level into Europeana, the European digital library. "In the meantime, more than 24 million data records from 417 cultural and scientific institutions have been added," adds Oliver Götze from the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, which coordinated the DDB project and prepared the data records submitted by district archivist Konstantin Huber.
