The not-for-profit technology provider for research and education, Jisc, and the publisher Wiley, are to digitise a one-million-page collection on the history of science. Through the partnership, the resulting digital collection will be free to all UK universities and colleges and, once the licences to the content expire, will be made available openly and globally password-free. Scholars and teachers will be able to freely access materials dating roughly between 1800 to the 1970s via the Wiley Digital Archives platform. The history of science collection will be available from March next year, giving access to primary source material that might otherwise have been hard to access, and difficult to use.

Historical newspapers are an important resource for academic research in various disciplines – particularly in Germany, where the newspaper sector is and always has been particularly diverse and prolific. The large-scale digitisation, full-text cataloguing and provision of online access to historical newspapers is an important desideratum. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has set up a funding programme in support of this work.

The project “DDB Zeitungsportal” (DDB Newspaper Portal) will encompass the development and implementation of a portal that provides centralised, user-friendly access to digitised historical newspapers from all over Germany. The technological and organisational basis for this portal is the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library – DDB).