Digitisation and Digital Humanities

Digitisation

The Gotha Research Library is committed to an open and free scientific culture. It is actively shaping the digital transformation and, in cooperation with numerous partners from science, information infrastructures and society, is expanding its digital activities and services and transforming its holdings into digital space.

For this purpose, the Gotha Research Library has a digitisation centre at Friedenstein Palace. It serves to scan the unique, culturally and historically significant and research-relevant holdings as well as other collections at the research location of Gotha in a sustainable manner using stock-conserving technology in accordance with national standards. Digitisation is carried out on behalf of users, within the framework of projects funded by third parties and in an internal digitisation programme. 

With its high-performance scanning technology, the digitisation centre is part of a cooperative digitisation workflow. In cooperation with the University Computing and Media Centre of the University of Erfurt and the Thuringian University and State Library in Jena the work is distributed between the Gotha, Erfurt and Jena locations. The digital copies are presented in the “Digitale Historische Bibliothek” (Digital Historical Library) of Erfurt/Gotha, the periodical portal Journals@UrMEL and the “Digitale Bibliothek Thüringen” (Digital Library of Thuringia). They are also made permanently accessible and reusable for research worldwide without restriction in open access via other regional, national and international portals such as the “Kultur- und Wissensportal Thüringen” (Thuringia Culture and Knowledge Portal), the “Zentrales Verzeichnis Digitalisierter Drucke” (Central Index of Digitalised Prints) and the "Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek" (German Digital Library).

The permanent storage of the digital copies is carried out with the support of the Thuringian University and State Library Jena and the University Computing and Media Centre Erfurt.

Digital Humanities

In close dialogue with specialist disciplines, libraries, archives and museums, the Gotha Research Library is committed to the research-supported development and expansion of digital research infrastructures for the visualisation of knowledge and collections. To this end, in addition to the research-led digitisation of cultural assets, it carries out digital humanities projects with cooperation partners. The library also participates in standardisation processes, the development of workflows, interoperable data models and contributes to the development and further development of national databases. With its annual Digital Humanities events, it provides impulses for the theoretical-methodological discourse in the GLAM field.