10 Years German Digital Library

When Hermann Parzinger, President of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) and spokesman for the Executive Board of the Competence Network of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, presented the new portal in the Altes Museum (Old Museum) in Berlin in November 2012, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek already had its own history, which we have already told.

But then the work really started and today central organizational building blocks were expanded: the Berlin office of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz with the areas of finance, law and communication and the project coordination responsible for technology, service and development at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library) in Frankfurt, as well as the service center and the division-specific specialist offices working throughout Germany, which are now established contact points for potential data partners, grew. Technically, the development also progressed with the open programming interface (API), which was activated in 2013: from now on, users were able to access data from the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and embed it in new contexts.

Shortly afterwards, in 2014, the first full version of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek was presented with around eight million data sets from over 100 institutions. Monika Grütters, then Minister of State for Culture and the Media, already pointed in the direction in which the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek was to develop in the following years: "It is important to me that it is now also possible to address via the Internet those who rarely or not at all visit museums, libraries, concert halls and other cultural institutions. With the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, we are gaining new opportunities to bring them into contact with our cultural heritage, to interest them in it and to reduce fears of the threshold.”

In the same year, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek carried out another pioneering development: with its first sub portal, it acknowledges the different needs of different users and, with the archive portal D, opens its first sector-specific access.

And it continues at this pace: In 2014, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek launched a comprehensive strategy process to define the focus of work for the vision of a central platform for culture and knowledge in Germany in Strategy 2020. In 2015, DDBpro went online: a portal for data partners of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek with extensive information on registration, data delivery and prerequisites for participation in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.In 2016, our first newsletter was published – now an essential information medium for users as well as for cultural institutions. Since then, more than fifty editions have been published that report on the diversity of the holdings, tell exciting or surprising stories about collections and objects, introduce new data partners or address important aspects of culture and digitization. Work began in 2017 on modernising the technical infrastructure, the result of which, a new data architecture, was presented at the first major network meeting of the Deutsche  Digitale Bibliothek, the DDBforum 2018.

Finally, 2019 will be a special year in the history of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek because like everywhere else, light and dark are close together. The early death of Uwe Müller, Managing Director and responsible for the areas of technology, development and service at the Frankfurt site, hit our team hard. In the same year, the portal reached the 30-million mark: freely accessible data sets from cultural and knowledge institutions of all disciplines and disciplines, of which more than 10 million objects can be retrieved as digital copies, a development that is also due to the improved performance of the new Basis System. Also this year, our service for virtual exhibitions was launched: Since then, cultural and knowledge institutions have been able to curate and publish their own virtual exhibitions: a real added value for a virtual context-focused presentation of topics, objects and collections and a success that has quickly spread around cultural institutions: more than 150 exhibitions have since gone online! And finally, a change at the top was already hinting at the end of the year:

In 2020, Dr Julia Spohr took over the management of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek after Frank Frischmuth, former Managing Director of Finance, Law, Communication and Marketing, left the German Digital Library at the end of 2019. In the spring of the same year, the leadership was again complete with Gerke Dunkhase, who since then has been in charge of the areas of technology, development and service of the Deutsche Digitale Bibiothek, and both are united in the goal of making the cultural heritage accessible to the public in many ways and of further developing and expanding the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek for the public.

While from 2020 the global coronavirus pandemic brought public life to a standstill in many places, cultural institutions had to take new digital paths and employees were forced into their home offices, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek was working on its realignment: with the award for its project "User-oriented restructuring of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek" from funds of the funding programme NEUSTART KULTUR of the Federal Government, the user experience for all users is to be designed intuitively and tailored to different needs and new formats and media for interactive participation and participatory cultural mediation are to be in the foreground. At the same time, around half of the allocated funds were used to support digitisation projects. The outstanding response of cultural institutions shows how right this decision was and how great the need for funds for digitisation projects has become.

2021 was not only the year of the projections, but also of the visible results: In autumn, two sub portals of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek were launched: First, the Deutsche Zeitungsportal (German Newspaper Portal) was launched with central access to historical newspapers covering a period of almost three centuries and largely with full-text access: now, newspaper texts, advertisements, advertisements and publications can be read, images, full texts and metadata can be accessed – enthusiastic feedback from the public and the media show the great interest in cultural heritage. Shortly afterwards, the next sub portal followed: "Sammlungsgut aus kolonialen Kontexten" (Collections Taken from Colonies) Its development goes back to the "3 Way Strategy" of the federal government, the federal states and top municipal associations and was initially developed with selected pilot facilities as a prototype. In the future, the portal will be expanded into a comprehensive central publication platform for information on collections from colonial contexts in German cultural and knowledge institutions.

At the same time, we have renewed our homepage and not only expanded and improved the search for objects with additional options for searching, browsing and discovering , but also set a second focus: Our editorial content – articles, virtual exhibitions, calendar sheets, etc. – offers easier access to the now more than 44 million entries from more than 700 data partners.

And they, the cultural and knowledge institutions interested in participating in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek portal for data partners in the new design since autumn 2022. Because with the constant growth of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, further developed technical requirements, ever more complex questions about copyright and licenses, it had to meet the growing demands. Thanks to the funding provided by the Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien (Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media) as part of the "Neustart Kultur" ("Restart Culture") programme, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek was able to completely renew DDBpro and make it more user-oriented.

This also casts a glance outward: In the spring of 2023, after ten years of steady growth and continuous further development, we will present the redesigned portal on digital cultural heritage and the results of the funding within the framework of the funding programme NEUSTART KULTUR by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. We look forward to it – and thank all those who have contributed to the development of the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek as a place of communication of digital cultural heritage to a wide audience over the past ten years.