7 July 2021 press release

The German National Library is involved in setting up the “Text+” research data infrastructure

Following the Joint Science Conference’s approval of the “Text +” network, the initiative will be funded by the German Research Foundation for an initial five-year period. With its involvement in “Text +”, the German National Library is continuing its activities in the areas of the digital humanities, the digital humanities and social sciences, in accordance with its Strategic Priorities and is actively promoting networking activities within academia. The “Text +” network comprises over 30 partners from university and non-university research institutions and memorial institutions. Its aim is to preserve text- and language-based research data for the long term and facilitate its wide-spread utilisation in academia.

The German National Library is contributing to the “Text+” corpus of data with open-access information such as metadata and digitised tables of contents as well as with new opportunities for academics to work with its digital collections via text- and data-mining in compliance with statutory regulations. In addition, the Integrated Authority File GND offers great potential as an interdisciplinary cataloguing tool for semantic networking. The GND is managed in collaboration with libraries, library networks and other cultural and academic institutions. At present, the GND contains around 8.8 million authority data records for persons, corporate bodies, congresses, geographic entities, topics and works; these are supplemented, updated and used on a regular basis.

“With its work on behalf of “Text+” as both a partner and service provider, the German National Library is establishing itself within a network of digital humanities stakeholders and opening itself up to the establishment of research collaborations”, says Franz Scholze, Director General of the German National Library. “At the same time, the library is utilising its extensive expertise – which ranges from the digitisation of analogue holdings and the collection of original digital data, through to the evaluation of large data quantities and the long-term preservation of digital data – within this collaborative project.”

„As part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), “Text+” is establishing a research data infrastructure centred around text-, written and language-based research data. As the foundations of human culture, knowledge and communication, these materials encompass several thousand years of cultural heritage, which have been collected and enriched over many years by researchers within the humanities and related disciplines. The network will initially focus on digital collections, lexical resources and academic text editions. Such digital data are of great importance for all language-and text-based disciplines – especially for linguistic, literature and cultural studies, philosophy, philologies and anthropology. As text and language continue to play a key role in communication, a great number of other disciplines can benefit from “Text+”, including the social, economic and political sciences.

Background

For more than 100 years, the German National Library has been collecting, documenting and archiving all media works in text, image and sound format published in Germany since 1913 along with foreign publications about Germany or in the German language; these are then made available to the public. It offers a comprehensive range of services at its sites in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main along with digital services that can be accessed all over the world insofar as this is permitted by copyright.

The German National Library also holds extensive special collections of inestimable value in the German Exile Archive 1933–1945 and the German Museum of Books and Writing. It regularly organises readings, exhibitions, presentations and concerts to draw attention to its treasures and promotes a culture of books, reading and music with more than 40 million media units, around 220,000 visitors a year to its premises in Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main, with a vibrant programme of top-class events that will also take place online.

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