Managing e-legal deposit of electronic versions of daily newspapers in Germany

Abstract

When the law (DNBG) regarding the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library, DNB), passed in 2006, came into force, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek received the additional task of collecting, cataloguing, indexing and archiving also non-physical media works (online publications).

The German National Library has been implementing a fully-automated workflow for the acquisition, cataloguing and archiving of all kinds of online material since then. We can handle e-books, online theses, digitised content, music files, audio books, e-journals, digital newspapers and we started archiving websites.

Newspaper publishers are increasingly distributing not only printed editions but also digital versions of the same content featuring the same layout – so-called e-papers – for their subscribers to access via the Internet. The German National Library has been collecting these e-paper editions of daily newspapers since 2010. In conjunction with a service provider, the library developed an automated process in order to handle the large amounts of data. This is now put into routine action and used to collect the editions of 930 daily and 18 Sunday newspapers from the publishers' servers, to convert them into PDF/A format which is suitable for long-term preservation, and to enter them into the German National Library's catalogue and archive systems. In June 2014 users were able to access roughly 520.000 issues containing over 22 million pages online in the reading rooms. Every month approximately 19,000 new issues are added. They are made available to the general public within 8 days in the Leipzig and Frankfurt reading rooms. Accordingly, from 2011 the practice of microfilming daily newspapers started by the German National Library in the 1960s has now been dispensed with in cases where an e-paper which corresponds in full to the printed edition is available.

Since the project has been successful the German National Library plans to extend the collection of e-papers to about 1,200 e-paper titles, representing the majority of the approximately 1,500 daily newspapers currently published in Germany.

As an example of a fully-automated workflow for the acquisition, cataloguing and archiving of online material the paper will present the German National Library’s workflow for e-papers which corresponds in full to the printed edition.