Large-scale digitisation

In 2003 the Austrian National Library began its first large-scale digitisation initiative. Its main focus was digitising historical Austrian newspapers from 1700 to about 1938. At present more than 4.5 million newspaper pages are available online, with an increase of about a million pages per year. The portal for digitised newspapers of the Austrian National Library, ANNO (Austrian Newspapers Online), receives daily hits from about 800 users.

The second large-scale text digitisation initiative ALEX is concentrated on historic and contemporary parliamentary materials and legal texts of Austria and of the Habsburg Monarchy. At the moment approximately a million pages are online and more than 300 readers a day open up the ALEX portal.

At present access to those materials is possible only in image mode. The aim of the Library is to make all the available texts of those documents researchable in full text in the future. The Austrian National Library is taking part in this context in a research project partly financed by the European Commission and aimed at improving automatic text recognition of historical printed materials.

The third large-scale digitisation project of the Library is aimed at digitising photographs and historic portraits. 100,000 photographs and 186,000 portraits from the Picture Archives of the Austrian National Library are now accessible in a special picture database. A further goal of the project is the scientific documentation of the portraits.