Milestone reached: GEI-Digital halfway to one million!

Milestone reached: GEI-Digital halfway to one million!

Since the start of the digitisation project GEI-Digital in 2009, we have digitised approximately 560,000 pages from over 3000 volumes of historic textbooks. The project is currently in its second phase, at the end of which we hope to have processed another 300,000 pages.

In other words, the Georg Eckert Institute's digital textbook library is continuing to grow, providing academics and other interested parties with a continuously expanding research base in historical research into textbooks. The long-term project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), is digitising textbooks of the seventeeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century in order to make them available to researchers as a corpus of primary sources.

People around the world can now use GEI-Digital content to gain an impression of what textbooks were like in former ages and of the virtually forgotten names once given to places, states and regions. At the outset of the twentieth century, for instance, pupils at German schools learned in their geography lessons that Mount Kilimanjaro, also known at that time as the Kaiser Wilhelm Peak, standing at 5895 m, was the German Empire’s highest mountain; it featured accordingly frequently in colour illustrations in textbooks [link: http://gei-digital.gei.de/viewer/resolver?urn=urn%3Anbn%3Ade%3A0220-gd-5940879. This is just one example of how users of GEI-Digital can compare the perspectives offered to young people today with those presented to pupils over a century ago.

GEI-Digital is a cooperation between the GEI, the Research Library for the History of Education at the German Institute for International Educational Research (BBF/DIPF) and the Gauss IT Centre at the TU Braunschweig.