Enlarged view:
Title, originally from the H.H. Becker Library, now under RHR208 in the Rhenish Department.
Enlarged view:
Old Becker signature of the title as the basis for the virtual collection note
Digital Prussian Rhine Province. The Collection of the Rhineland Monographs
The Rhineland Department of the University and City Library of Cologne contains an extensive and valuable collection of literature on the subject of "Rhineland in the Borders of the Old Prussian Rhine Province", which is now also available in digital form in the "Rhineland Monographs" collection. First of all, frequently used and rare pieces from this collection, which had been digitised on behalf of individual users or other libraries or in the course of external projects, found their way into the collection. The Rhineland Department has been systematically digitised since 2016. It began with the signature groups "RhR" ( law), which mainly contains historical source literature, and "RhG" ( history). Further "Rh-Groups" will follow, as these are usually older and therefore publications in the public domain.
In the course of digitisation, the title recordings of the books are checked and corrected if necessary. In addition, provenances are recorded and books that had been taken out of their original collection context by being incorporated into the arrangement system of the old Cologne City Library are reassigned to these collections by means of a virtual collection note. In addition to free digital access, a more profound indexing of this unique Rhineland collection is created.
Securing the written cultural heritage - preservation of the holdings in the North Rhine-Westphalian University and State Libraries
The libraries in North Rhine-Westphalia with significant old holdings - i.e. the state libraries ULB Bonn, ULB Düsseldorf, ULB Münster and USB Cologne - have been receiving special funds from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia since 2006 to preserve and secure their written cultural heritage. These funds are available in order to preserve the relevant literature related to North Rhine-Westphalia as comprehensively as possible and to make it available for use.
In order to systematically and extensively preserve and digitise the literature published in North Rhine-Westphalia without duplicating work, the state libraries share this task among themselves. The funds flow into various projects, e.g. individual restorations of heavily damaged volumes or protective cassettes for endangered and particularly valuable books.
An important building block in the conservation of the holdings today is the production of reproductions of endangered documents. Paper with large amounts of wood and acid, as it was used for newspaper printing from the middle of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century is extremely threatened by decay. In order to counteract the loss of texts, library and archive holdings have been systematically transferred to other media with great financial and practical effort for decades. In the past, these were primarily security films; however, today the path of digitisation is increasingly being chosen. The advantage of digitisation lies in its easier accessibility, as the fonts are then freely available worldwide on the Internet. However, the reliable long-term preservation of this data is a complex task which must be solved via secure repositories at national or European level.
As part of this project the UCL Cologne has digitized about 70 newspapers and magazines and 25 monographs related to the city of Cologne. There are about 750 volumes containing about 400,000 pages = 200,000 digitised documents, which were additionally filmed for security reasons. Currently, the raw digitised documents are stored on the server of the service provider Imageware, processed step by step and structured for indexing. Once this work has been completed, more detailed digitised documents will be available.
Special features of digitisation
Extent: 2939 Objects (December 2017)
Status: under construction Resolution: 300 dpi
Creation of the scans: Project-related digitization of the UCL Cologne
Quality Control and Web Presentation: Collection Management of the UCL Cologne
If you use our digitised documents, we would be pleased about the citing of our name.
This collection is marked with Open Access.
Open Access refers to the worldwide free access to scientific publications on the Internet, subject to copyright protection. No legal or financial barriers should stand in the way of the reader worldwide.
