A Survey of the Digitisation of German Newspapers in interwar Lithuania (1918–1940)

Abstract

This paper presents a survey of the preservation and digitisation status of the German-language press published in interwar Lithuania which existed between 1918 and 1940. Produced within this newly established and ethnically diverse republic which was operating in accordance with the European Minority Protection Regime, German-language newspapers and other periodicals formed a relevant part of the country’s multilingual press. They represent an interesting yet underexplored resource for historical and linguistic research. The survey summarises bibliographic information and the results of earlier digitisation projects. It further addresses challenges for optical character recognition (OCR) of newspaper facsimiles. Although systematic digitisation remains future work, the paper identifies major challenges for OCR within this collection in particular in relation to typographic variation.

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