Digital reference library of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Fairy Tales

The foundations of the fairytales: digitizing the Brothers Grimm’s private library

The library of the Brothers Grimm was largely handed to the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin University Library. It’s one of the most important private collections of its time in the field of German studies. What makes the collection so valueable are the numerous traces of work that can be found in the books, such as notes, markings and added pieces of paper. The library was a major work tool during the creation of the fairy tale collection, one of the most popular and well known works of literature. About 700 volumes can be counted to this part of the private library. A new project, grounding on perspectives of technology, literary studies and librarian knowledge, is now taking on the challenge to make the books, including all of their traces of provenance, accessible online. This includes presenting the images and full texts online and recognizing and transcribing handwritten passages. For this, a method of segmentation by training neural networks will be used. Handwritten artifacts will be found, categorized and transcribed automatically. The results will be evaluated by philologist experts, which will secure the quality of the automatic results.

It will be possible to filter and look for these traces in the digitized items.

The collection consists not only of the books that are located at the university library, but also of volumes that are held by other institutions.

The Chair of Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence and Applied Computer Science and the „Zentrum für Philologie und Digitalität "Kallimachos"“ of the University of Würzburg takes on the technological part of this interdisciplinary project. The philological part will be attented by the specialists of „German Studies with a Teaching and Research Focus on the Works and Impact of the Brothers Grimm“ of the University of Kassel. The Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin university library is in charge of cataloguing, digitizing and publishing the volumes. The project by the Deutche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Start of the project: 01.09.2024

Project management

Dr. Yong-Mi Rauch
yong-mi.rauch@ub.hu-berlin.de

Project team

Sarah Düver (Digitizaton Librarian)
Stefan Klausewitz (Digitization Services)

Cooperation partner

Herr Prof. Holger Ehrhardt
Fachgebiet German Studies with a Teaching and Research Focus on the Works and Impact of the Brothers Grimm, Universität Kassel  

Herr Prof. Frank Puppe
Chair of Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence and Applied Computer Science, Universität Würzburg  

Herr Dr. Christian Reul
Zentrum für Philologie und Digitalität „Kallimachos“, Universität Würzburg