About the German botanical journals collection 1753-1914

Scientific journal literature containing the descriptions of botanical species from 1753, the starting point of modern biological nomenclature through Linnaeus’ “Species Plantarum”, is still an essential source for the research of plant biodiversity. Characteristically of this discipline, especially in the German-speaking realm of the 19th Century, is the multitude of publications and journals that contain important articles and, until now, have not been the target of large-scale digitisation campaigns.

The Project

German botanical journals from 1753-1914 were digitised and indexed within the scope of a two-year DFG (German Research Foundation) project (finished September 2013). Journals are OCRed and full-text searchable, provided their typeface and text quality allowed it. The online articles are also made available to scientists by biological subject portals such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library Europe (BHL-Europe) and the Virtual Library of Biology (vifabio).

Project partners

The University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg (UB Frankfurt am Main) is the DFG-funded special subject collection library for biology. As the collection tradition in science stretches back to the 18th Century, the UB Frankfurt possesses a large collection of historical and current journals.

The largest German collection and research organisation for systematic botany and plant geography, the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem (BGBM) at the Freie Universität Berlin operates one of the most significant special botany libraries in Europe.

For this project, journals from these two libraries were preferentially used. 26 further libraries contributed so that German botanical journals, not already covered by other digitisation projects, could be fully digitised.

All digitised items are licensed by CC BY-NC-SA.

This project was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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