Bomber’s Baedeker – vom Text zum Bild zur Datenquelle

The two-volume printed work The Bomber's Baedeker. A Guide to the Economic Importance of German Towns and Cities was produced by the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Economic Warfare during the Second World War. It lists towns and cities of the German Reich with more than a thousand inhabitants and information on their war-related infrastructure, industrial and production facilities. Only four verified copies still exist worldwide and none of them has been digitally accessible for scholarly use until now. In 2019, The Bomber's Baedeker was (re-)discovered in the library of the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG), digitised in cooperation with the University Library of Mainz and made accessible and processed in a cross-institutional cooperation between the Digital Historical Research Unit | DH Lab of the IEG and the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, including in courses with students, so that The Bomber's Baedeker can now be used, analysed and further processed as an open, machine-readable data source in compliance with the FAIR principles.