Digital Library of the Digital Forum Central and Eastern Europe

The Digital Forum Central and Eastern Europe pursues the goal of digitizing historical printed works of multi-ethnic cultural landscapes of Eastern Europe - especially those with (formerly) larger German or German-speaking populations - and making them accessible to scholars and the interested public via its Digital Library.

While in the first few years the focus of the collection was entirely on historical German-language periodicals (especially newspapers and journals) from Eastern Europe, this source-categorical profile has since changed. In addition to periodicals, books (monographs, serial works, small publications), archival materials, and visual material (photographs, postcards, etc.) are now also integrated into the Digital Library - and no longer exclusively in German.

In the Digital Library, which was modernized from the ground up in 2017 by adopting the Czech Kramerius system, the periodical resources of the old DiFMOE platform (2008 - 2017), as well as the diverse content of the decentralized European Capital of Culture projects of the Digital Forum, namely Cassovia Digitalis (Kaschau/Košice 2013), Riga Digitalis (Riga/Rīga 2014), Pilsna Digitalis (Pilsen/Plzeň 2015) and Wratislavia Digitalis (Wrocław/Wrocław 2016), where they can be accessed both as a whole and separately as collections. The newer collections have been added where they can be accessed both as a whole and separately as collections. The newer collections "Brno" and "Bratislava", "Jewish Culture and History in Eastern Europe" and "Jewish-German Bukovina 1918+" have been added. Since November 1, 2021, DiFMOE has been dedicated to the realization of a digital collection on the "European Capital of Culture Timisoara 2023". This, like the previous ones, is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

The multilingual user interface of the digital library with its differentiated filter options enables browsing through collections, document categories, etc., but above all also serves for targeted research on specific objects.In addition, a map search for georeferenced image documents, co-developed by DiFMOE as part of the Kramerius Consortium, has been available since May 2023.All periodicals are OCR-captured after the completion of a holdings project and are thus full-text searchable.