About Zeit.shift

What can I find in the portal Zeit.shift?

How can I use the contents in Zeit.shift?

Can I search the contents in Zeit.shift by keyword?

Whom can I ask for help?

Newspapers and magazines as historical sources



About Zeit.shift

Zeit.shift – on a digital journey into yesterday’s future is the name of a cross-border project in close cooperation between the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library (Bolzano, IT), EURAC Research (Bolzano, IT), and the University and Regional Library Tyrol (Innsbruck, AT) for the sustainable preservation, access, and knowledge of the cultural text heritage of the historical region of Tyrol. The project aims to virtually bring together for the first time into a single web platform physically and regionally scattered newspapers and periodicals from the historical region of Tyrol with a focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The collection of digitized daily and weekly newspapers and periodicals documents significant historical, political, and social events of this period (e.g. World War I, annexation) and was prepared, with the support of computer linguistic approaches (e.g. Optical Character Recognition - OCR, Named Entity Recognition – NER), in a user-oriented manner. Using the example of historical daily and weekly newspapers and periodicals, Zeit.shift aims to preserve the textual heritage of the historical region of Tyrol in the long term and to make it freely accessible.

The portal fosters the preservation, research, and visualization of digitised historical newspapers and periodicals of the historical region of Tyrol and was supported by the European Regional Development Fund under the Interreg V-A Italy-Austria 2014-2020.

For more information go to https://all4ling.eurac.edu/projects/zeitshift/ and https://www.tessmann.it/en/about-us/projects/zeit-shift.html



What can I find in the portal Zeit.shift?

More than 80 newspapers and magazines from the historical region of Tyrol with a focus on the late 19th and early 20th centuries (as of May 2023).

The editions displayed go beyond the holdings of the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library and the University and Regional Library Tyrol and could be completed through the cooperation with many partner libraries, especially with the Library of the Tyrolean Heritage Museum Ferdinandeum, but also with archives, publishers, private and public institutions as well as private collectors, thus sparing users time-consuming library trips for research and perusal.

The following partner libraries, archives and institutions have made their holdings available:

The Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library, the University and Regional Library Tyrol, and EURAC Research aim to constantly expand the range of digitized historical collections in the Zeit.shift portal. To this end, new content will be added to the portal and further cooperation with other institutions is planned to expand the virtual collection.



How can I use the contents in Zeit.shift?

The access to the contents of the portal is free and possible without registration. The use is free of charge and in accordance with the Creative-Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-4.0-International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

The digitised copies can be displayed in the standard view (low resolution) or in high resolution. It is possible to download and/or print the entire image of a digital file or only a fragment of it in a PDF or JPEG format.

In the backoffice area, search results can be saved individually and accessed at any time.



Can I search the contents in Zeit.shift by keyword?

Yes, it is possible to search the contents in Zeit.shift by keyword. For this purpose, a full text search for keywords of all OCR-indexed files is available (OCR = optical character recognition). The search term found is shown by highlighting the respective keyword in the scan and by displaying an excerpt of the full text containing the search term. Search filters, such as place, family names, time span, etc., can be used additionally to narrow the search results specifically.

Note on the quality of automatic text recognition:

During the process of automatic full text recognition, some factors can complicate the correct recognition of the original text, such as the font (e.g. Fraktur script – German type) or the state of the scanned material (thin, transparent, dirty, yellowed or damaged paper as well as dust particles or little hairs on the microfilm images, very tightly bound books, etc.). Thus, the results of the automatic text recognition do not offer absolute compliance with the texts of the original documents. This can also affect the hit accuracy of a full text search in Zeit.shift.



Whom can I ask for help?

Please send your questions, ideas, suggestions or similar to zeitshift@tessmann.it.



Newspapers and magazines as historical sources

As memory institutions, libraries have the responsibility to preserve cultural textual heritage and keep it accessible. Historical newspapers in particular are valuable sources of regional and local history and provide an insight into past events and views. The historical newspapers and articles digitised in the portal Zeit.shift can be assigned to different world views and political movements. They are not subject to any evaluation, censorship, or the like. In this context, however, the portal Zeit.shift distances itself from all discriminatory, violence-glorifying and National Socialist content.