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European Historical Bibliographies

www.litdok.de

Bibliographic database on the History of East Central Europe

Herder-Institut

literaturdokumentation-zur-geschichte-ostmitteleuropas

The Herder-Institute in Marburg has been publishing an online-database concerning the history and culture of East Central Europe since 1998. The database, updated weekly, is accessible under the address www.litdok.de as well as on the homepage of the Institute.
The database collects all title data of the literature on the history of East Central Europe and gives links to the respective library resources. The database collects monographs, article in refereed journals and edited volumes and online-publications that are of importance for research on East Central Europe, that means the history of territories nowadays represented by Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary.
The characteristic features of the database are:
­–    the database is based on a division of labour of several working groups;
–    the database works multilingually and
–    the bibliographic data are made accessible by several indices.
The data acquisition  is done by division of labour with several institutions and libraries in East Central Europe who work on their own national or regional bibliographic documentations. The work is based on cooperation with the Historical Institutes of the Polish, Czech and Slovak Academies of Science, the Lithuanian Historical Institute, the Hungarian National Library, the Institute of History of Wrocław University, the University library in Toruń and the library of the Poznań voivodeship.
According to this cooperative relationship the database is offered multilingually. Inquiries can be made and are answered in German, English, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, Estonian Hungarian and Russian.
As an important feature of the database all title data are indexed by master records. Such master records are maintained for personal names, for geographical names and for subject keywords. All these entries are checked and verified. These master records are not only useful for research in the database but above that they offer an information set of its own. The authority records for persons offer all different forms of the respective name, the date and place of birth and death as well as a short profile of the person. The geographical authority records give all the variations of a given name in the different languages and fix the administrative and national affiliation. The subject key words are structured in different fields of interest so the key word collection represents in nuce a thesaurus of the historical-political language of East Central Europe.
The scope of the database totals at the moment (April 2009) more than 510,000 entries.  The average growth is about 40,000 title data/year.

Herder-Institut e.V.
Literaturdokumentation zur Geschichte Ostmitteleuropas

Gisonenweg 5-7
35037 Marburg

Tel: +49(0)6421-184119
Fax: +49 (0)6421-184139


www.herder-institut.de
www.litdok.de