Heidelberg historic literature – digitized
Heidelberg historic literature – digitized is the front end for Heidelberg University’s digital resources, providing remarkable access to a huge variety of digitised content: books printed before 1900, archival materials relating to the University, charters, papyri, and manuscripts of all periods.
There is plenty of bibliophile interest here, but also much of research interest: less visually appealing than the medieval manuscripts, but supremely useful, are the embedded libraries of reference content. In Literature on theory and history of Art – digitized, for example, Heidelberg University Library provides digital full-text versions of selected reference works from its historical collections and makes them available on the internet free of charge. The bulk of this material is nineteenth and early twentieth century, and en masse it represents an extremely useful collection of digitised books for those working in all fields of art history, where standard reference texts, long out of print and often ‘weeded’ from libraries, can be extremely difficult to find.
In the field of xylography, for example, it is possible to find searchable copies of all eight volumes of W. L. Schreiber’s monumental catalogue of fifteenth-century wood- and metal-cuts, Handbuch der Holz- und Metallschnitte des XV. Jahrhunderts. Even more useful are the complete digital copies of 21 volumes of Paul Heitz’s Einblattdrucke des fünfzehnten Jahrhunderts. This series of 100 volumes reproduced life-sized images of all the wood and metal cuts then recorded; many of these single-leaf impressions have since been lost to war, natural disaster, and looting. There are rare and important auction catalogues of early prints, like Schreiber’s own Monumenta xylographica, and a selection of the remarkably rich auction catalogues issued by firms such as Joseph Baer & Co., Gilhofer und Ranschburg, Ludwig and Jacques Rosenthal, and Antiquariat Emil Hirsch.
Like all digital libraries, the interface can be frustrating for the viewer, but the ability to download searchable pdfs negates the need to navigate online. Not the most exciting books in the world, but of paramount importance for researchers.
Edward Potten, Vice-President
