Archive
Die Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Teßmann hat in Zusammenarbeit mit verschiedenen Institutionen einige Projekte erfolgreich durchgeführt.
Completed Projects
- Zeit.shift – A citizen humanities project for the preservation, development and communication of the cultural and textual heritage of the historical region of Tyrol
Project
The aim of the project is the cross-border institutional cooperation for the sustainable preservation, development and communication of the cultural text heritage of the historical region Tyrol. However, the relevant holdings of written cultural assets of the region Tyrol are dispersed over the different parts of the area and are not available in any singular physical or digital library in their entirety. So far, the documents have only been partially digitised and are only insufficiently known and accessible to the public. Through cross-border digitisation and communication strategies in
close cooperation between the Dr. Friedrich Tessmann Library, the University and Regional Library Tyrol, and Eurac Research, these physically and regionally scattered text collections are for the first time brought together virtually in a single web platform and processed in a user-oriented manner using computer linguistic approaches. The example of historical newspapers are prototypically used as they are imminently threatened by decay. A main focus of the project is the active involvement of the public. Already in the project phase, citizens are invited to actively participate in the text indexing through online annotations of the text material. Thus, the users are introduced to historical text sources and made familiar with their own cultural heritage. The common web platform provides the basis for the cooperation with other institutions beyond the duration of the Project.
Leadpartner: Abteilung Deutsche Kultur in der Südtiroler Landesverwaltung – Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Teßmann
Partner: Eurac Research – Istituto di linguistica applicata, Università di Innsbruck – Biblioteca Universitaria e Regionale del Tirolo
Associated Partners: Euregio Tirol-Südtirol-Trentino, Abteilung Tiroler Landesarchiv der Tiroler Landesregierung, Tiroler Landesmuseen, Südtiroler Kulturinstitut, Tiroler Bildungsforum, Südtiroler Landesarchiv der Autonomen Provinz Bozen-Südtirol, Bibliotheksverband Südtirol
Project duration: October 2020 – October 2022
Budget: 658.000 € (443.000 € UE, 56.000 € national funding, 159.000 € own funds)
Objectives
1. Digitisation of Tyrolean historical newspapers
2. Development and implementation of a citizen science initiative to curate and enrich the digitised newspapers
3. Computational linguistic processing of the digitised newspapers to improve data search and visualisation options
4. Digital access to the complete collection of newspapers via a web platform to support research and education
Get involved!
Get involved and help us locate and tag historical advertisements on Historypin in order to reconstruct the commercial landscape of early 20th century Tyrol. Many shops from those times still exist today!
For more information: https://all4ling.eurac.edu/de/zeitshift/
Feel free to contact us: zeitshift@tessmann.it - Making democracy tangible. Digitisation of the verbatim records of the Provincial Assembly of South Tyrol
Project
The verbatim records of the Provincial Assembly of South Tyrol from the period 1948 to 2020 comprise just under 200,000 pages. All pages are being digitised and made full-text searchable by the Provincial Library Dr. Friedrich Teßmann in cooperation with the Provincial Assembly of South Tyrol. To do this, the typewritten text is extracted from the existing image files and converted into searchable full-text files using specialised software. Both the image files and the text files are then made available to all interested parties on the Tessmann digital portal.
The transcripts contain the complete speeches of all members of the Provincial Assembly. These verbatim records thus provide a vivid insight into the different political positions and discussions during the process leading to the Second Autonomy Statute.
Partners: German Culture Department in the South Tyrol Provincial Administration – Provincial Library Dr. Friedrich Teßmann, Provincial Assembly of South Tyrol
Project timeframe: December 2021 – October 2022
The project is an initiative of the “50 Years of the Second Autonomy Statute and 30 Years of Dispute Resolution” anniversary, which was celebrated in 2022 with a series of events organised by the provincial administration, Provincial Assembly, University, EURAC and other institutions. - ARGO – Navigating South Tyrol´s Media Catalogues
Project
Increasingly, educational and cultural institutions are combining their online catalogues in the form of a union catalogue. ARGO is to be developed and established under the motto “All of South Tyrol´s media resources for citizens under one roof”: a smart Discovery System for digital and analogue media in all languages from South Tyrol´s libraries, for films and photographic material from media centres and archives as well as for Open Government Data from the educational, cultural and administrative sectors.
Lead partners: German Culture Department in the South Tyrol Provincial Administration – Provincial Library Dr. Friedrich Teßmann
Project timeframe: February 2017 – September 2020
Budget: 1.47 Mio. Euro (50% EU; 35% Italy; 15% Province of Bolzano)
Goals
1. Development of a Discovery Engine for searching digital and analogue media from South Tyrol´s libraries, films and photographic material from media centres and archives as well as Open Government Data from the educational, cultural and administrative sectors
2. Integration of the National Service Card, the “Bürgerkarte” (digital identity), as a standardized authentication tool
3. Development of a user-friendly, multilingual front-end portal, for stationary and mobile terminals
Contact
Department 14 – Deutsche Kultur
Head of Department - Dr. Volker Klotz
Landhaus 7, Andreas-Hofer-Straße 18
39100 Bozen
Tel. +39 0471 413310
E-mail: kulturabteilung@provinz.bz.it Displaced Positions - 12 South Tyrol artists reflect on prejudices concerning migration
Displaced Positions is a province-wide one-year library project, initiated by the Provincial Library in cooperation with Museion and actively supported by Department for Libraries and Reading and the Coordination Office for Integration.
The Provincial Library would like to take this opportunity to take a stance on current events and raise our perception with regard to entrenched opinions and (pre)judgements. For this purpose, 12 artists from South Tyrol have been invited to confront prejudices on the subject of migration. Each artist has designed a postcard on the subject.
The postcards are displacements of positions - commonly held in public opinion – on the refugee issue.
Each person borrowing a book from the library receives one of these postcards, which also serves as a reminder of the return date or bookmark. Every month a new work of art is featured in postcard form. The cards can be collected over the course of a year and stuck onto a large annual sheet calendar, to which one´s own thoughts, notes and experiences can be added. The initiative is an invitation to confront the topic personally over the course of the year and question prejudices. Calendars and postcards are available free of charge at all libraries taking part in the initiative.
The calendar runs from 24th October 2015 to 22nd October 2016. At the end of each month, an appropriate number of postcards will be sent to the libraries in the South Tyrol lending service via the delivery service of the Office for Film and Media and from there can be collected by all interested libraries. Using the banderole supplied, the calendar can be rolled up and handed out to patrons.
Participating artists:
Julia Bornefeld, Arnold Dall’O, Nicolò Degiorgis, Hannes Egger, Saman Kalantari, Franz Pichler, Brigitte Mahlknecht, Silvia Hell, Serena Osti, Simon Perathoner, Sara Schwienbacher, Gabriela Oberkofler.
Postcard #1
Gabriela Oberkofler: Du riechst gut
Postcard #2
Nicolò Degiorgis: Safinah Nuh (Noahs Boot)
Postcard #3
Serena Osti: Träume und Albträume
Postcard #4
Simon Perathoner: Heimat_Glitch 2.0
Postcard #5
Julia Bornefeld: Confidence I
Postcard #6
Arnold Dall'O: Wer ist der "Andere"?
Postcard #7
Sara Schwienbacher: Stay Here!
Postcard #8
Hannes Egger: Smartphone Aid
Postcard #9
Silvia Hell: Biografie
Postcard #10
Brigitte Mahlknecht: Ohne Titel "Im Grunde wollte ich noch nie..."
Postcard #11
Saman Kalantari: The Original Displaced Position
Postcard #12
Franz Pichler: Verbinden- OPATCH - Open Platform for Access to and Analysis of Textual Documents of Cultural Heritage
The two-year research project OPATCH - Open Platform for Access to and Analysis of Textual Documents of Cultural Heritage was conducted from the beginning of 2014 to the end of March 2016 under the direction of the Eurac Institute for Specialised Communication and Multilingualism. In addition to EURAC and the Provincial Library Dr. Friedrich Teßmann, the Institute of Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences was an associated partner of the project.
The project was financed by the Autonomous Province of Bolzano – South Tyrol, Department 34 Innovation, Research and University under Provincial Law 14.
Computational linguists at EURAC, together with librarians at Teßmann and scientists of the Institute of Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, investigated how the latest technologies from computational linguistics, statistics and information visualisation can be combined and further developed in order to expand and improve search portals for text collections. The focus, based on the requirements of the various users, was on developing a system that covers the entire work process: from data extraction and processing through to their presentation via user portals.
Today, the digital newspaper archive contains already around a dozen historical daily newspapers in German from the Alpine region for the period 1910 to 1920. It is accessible to everyone on the Internet at https://digital.tessmann.it. The attached full text data provide not only historians, chroniclers and genealogists with new, convenient approaches and channels for research.
In addition to the digital newspaper archive, there is also a new portal for the linguistic analysis of contemporary South Tyrol texts, such as novels, specialist articles or even recipes, which are collected in the South Tyrol corpus. Linguists can use the platform to investigate which words are frequently used together or how word usage changes over time. Various graphical representations, so-called visualisations, are available for this purpose. Line diagrams are used to visualise how the frequencies of words behave in different texts and over time. Tree-like visualisations, on the other hand, show which contexts are the most typical for a search word.
Entry page to the two search portals: http://commul.eurac.edu/opatch/
EURAC contact:
Verena Lyding
+39 0471 055 127
verena.lyding@eurac.edu
Provincial Library Dr. Friedrich Teßmann contact
Johannes Andresen
+39 0471 471811
johannes.andresen@tessmann.it - Teßmann goes Europeana
The Provincial Library „Dr. Friedrich Teßmann“ participates together with a group of 16 partner institutions from all over Europe in the EU-project „Europeana Newspapers – A Gateway To Newspapers Online“ with the objective to optimise and simplify research in digitised historical newspaper pages.
Daily press is an important source of information – not only as a means of coverage of local news and politics and world affairs but also as a testimonial of past days. Therefore, it becomes a valuable research base e.g. for studies in history, social science or linguistics. To simplify the access to historical newspapers and to protect the paper from decomposition, numerous libraries and other institutions have begun to scan large newspaper stocks and to make these digitised versions accessible for their users. Between 2006 and 2011 also the Teßmann Library digitised about 1.5 million newspaper pages that are accessible through its portal „Teßmann digital“. Over 40 newspapers and periodicals of the area of historical Tyrol are presented to the users within this portal and can be selected easily from the list of titles or the calendar navigation. Since the digital copies are currently only available as image files, it is not possible to search for keywords within the newspaper texts and users have to proceed the traditional way by flipping through every single page. This, however, is going to change thanks to the participation of the Teßmann Library in the EU-project „Europeana Newspapers“ that aims to enable specific research in digitised newspaper stocks. For this purpose the digitised pages are processed with a software for automatic text conversion (OCR – Optical Character Recognition) and article segmentation (OLR – Optical Layout Recognition) allowing full-text search in digitised newspapers as well as the detection of a specific keyword in a certain position within a text, for example in a headline or a lead.
A particular challenge for automatic character recognition is that the majority of historical newspapers were printed in Gothic print which cannot always be detected properly by the OCR software. Therefore, the University of Innsbruck and the German company CSS- Content Conversion Specialists GmbH are working on the improvement of the automatic character recognition of historical publications in the course of this EU-project. Their findings will be documented in a best-practice paper which may provide a base to other institutions and projects dealing with automatic indexing of digitised texts.
At the end of the EU-project the participating libraries will provide over 18 millions of digitised newspaper pages technically refined for specific research through the European online culture portal Europeana (www.europeana.eu). The Teßmann Library will then upload those refined newspaper pages to its portal „Digital Newspaper Archive“, allowing its users the specific search within the stock of digitised newspapers.
Institutions participating in the project:Berlin State Library
National Library of Estonia
University of Helsinki, National Library of Finland
National Library of France
CCS Content Conversion Specialists GmbH
National Library of Latvia
University of Belgrad
Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library
University of SalfordNational Library of the Netherlands
Austrian National Library
Hamburg State and University Library
National Library of Poland
LIBER Foundation
National Library of Turkey
University of Innsbruck
The British Library
The European Library
Further information on the project can be read on the website of the EU-project www.europeana-newspapers.eu.
For questions on the project please contact Karin Pircher (Karin.Pircher@tessmann.it). DI-ÖSS: Digital infrastructure for the ecosystem of South Tyrolean language data and services. A digital platform to exchange language data, texts and services. Towards south tyrolean digital cultural heritage of the region.
DI-ÖSS is a digital infrastructure project directed by the language technology group of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Eurac Research. It aims at building a prototype of a digital infrastructure to connect language data and services in South Tyrol. DI-ÖSS works with local partners in the city of Bolzano, establishing connection and exchange of expertise between different institutions with different aims. In particular, the main partners involved in the project are: the Landesbibliothek Dr. Friedrich Tessmann (library), Sprachstelle in the Südtiroler Kulturinstitut (language unit of the cultural center), and Salto.bz (publishing house and news portal). Libraries, cultural institutes and publishing houses have different aims in their daily workflow, but they mostly deal with a similar process (collection, processing, analysis and dissemination of the material). DI-ÖSS wants to optimize the work process of the partner institutions via an exchange of expertise, data and services. For example: the main objective of a research institute is that of processing and analyzing data, but in order to do that it needs first to catalogue the material; while libraries´ first aim is that of cataloguing books and texts. If they share their expertise both work processes could be faster and more thorough, libraries can help research institutes to catalogue, and research institute could help libraries e.g to improve search techniques in their collections. With this project, Eurac research wants to foster an optimization of competences via collaboration, in order to improve the quality of the results for all the partners. In order to address every institution according to their needs, specific use cases will be addressed for every partner. A use case serves the genuine aim of the institution; it should allow a synergy with the other partners in order to foster an exchange of expertise in both directions; it should be reusable in other similar situations; and finally it should allow an infrastructure to support it. These are the steps needed to set the basis of the infrastructure, which will be running in prototypical stage before 2020. Finally yet importantly, the ultimate aim of DI-ÖSS is that of setting the basis for the South Tyrolean digital cultural heritage: Start local, think big.
