Metadata of the "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke"

This data publication was created with the intent to provide bibliographic and subject indexing metadata for research purposes and the development of AI applications. This data publication can be regarded as the German national bibliography of the period 1500–1800. It consists of two files: The first one provides all bibliographic master records pertaining to the German national bibliography which were edited and revised and electronically copied to the union catalogue K10plus, the shared database of the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg (BSZ) and the Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG). The second one lists the unique identifiers (“Pica-Produktionsnummer”) of all master records available in the union catalogue K10plus which have been digitised, and it contains the links to their digital copies.

The primary intention for this data publication was the provision of a large computationally amenable dataset exclusively consisting of bibliographic metadata to stimulate research and development of AI applications. In 2025, large (meta-)datasets from the field of historical cultural data are still missing. In this respect, the data publication provided here aims to fill a gap. The files are suitable for the computational use of digitised and born-digital collections according to the Collections as Data principles.

The data publication was created by two librarians and a member of the team of the research project “Mensch.Maschine.Kultur – Künstliche Intelligenz für das Digitale Kulturelle Erbe” at Berlin State Library (SBB). The research project was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), project grant no. 2522DIG002. The Minister of State for Culture and the Media is part of the German Federal Government.