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The article reports on how the Austrian National Library in Vienna, Austria is working on converting historical documents into digital documents, so that they can be published on the internet. The project is focusing on the daily newspapers that were published in the constituent lands of the Austrian Empire during the reign of the House of Habsburg, an Austrian royal ruling family, and is being financed by the ERSTE Stiftung, a foundation of the Erste Bank financial institution.

Since May 2013, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German research community) supports pilot projects dealing with the digitalization of historic newspapers at four libraries in Germany, one of them the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Bremen (State and university library Bremen). At the same time, the Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB, journal data bank) is extended and the DFG viewers for newspapers are adapted. The participating libraries not only enlarge the number of digitalized newspapers significantly, but work out standards of newspaper digitalization which will also be relevant for future digitalization projects. The SuUB Bremen's pilot project aims at digitalizing all German-language newspapers of the 17th century which are more completely availiable here than anywhere else. The newspapers are presented on the digital collections portal of the SuUB Bremen (http://brema.suub.uni-bremen.de/) based on the software Visual Library. This paper represents newspaper digitalization in the context of the DFG's current support policy. Apart from emphasizing the standard and structure forming aims of the pilot projects, the specific orientation and the peculiarities of the Bremen project are the subject of the following report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the 2012 conference of the Mikrofilmarchiv der deutschsprachigen Presse (Microfilm Archives of the German-Language Press), held at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (German National Library, DNB) and focused on microfilm preservation and digitization of newspapers. Topics discussed included microfilming or digitization of print newspapers compared to digital preservation of e-papers, selection criteria for digitization, and reader attitudes to different media formats.