zvdd - Technische Erweiterung

The "Central Register of Digitized Printed Works" (zvdd) project was launched in 2005 to establish a central national portal for digitized printed materials. The initiative was prompted by the fact that, at the time, numerous DFG-funded digitization projects were either underway or already completed, employing a wide variety of technologies and standards. As an evaluation of these digitization efforts noted, this resulted in an "absolute fragmentation of available content," meaning that "digitized resources are nowhere near as well-known or widely used as their potential warrants" (DFG evaluation report on the retrospective digitization of library holdings, 2005). Alongside the establishment of DFG standards for creating digital copies, a key solution to this problem was the development of the zvdd—carried out between 2005 and 2008—as a national discovery system for digitized printed works.
By now, almost all digital copies produced with DFG funding are listed and searchable in the zvdd and can be viewed directly from the portal using the DFG Viewer. The number of digitized works listed in the zvdd index has increased more than tenfold since the original portal was completed: in December 2008, the index listed around 100,000 works; by the time the application for this expansion project was submitted in December 2010, that figure had risen to just under 200,000; and by the end of April 2014, the zvdd contained more than 1,140,000 digitized works that are searchable and available via Open Access.
The zvdd originally required data from various DFG digitization projects to be manually transferred into the index, a process that entailed an enormous conversion workload. As digitization efforts in libraries and archives accelerated, it became clear that manual processing had to be minimized to keep the portal up to date. Consequently, in collaboration with the DFG, it was decided to mandate the use of the METS/MODS format as the standard for data ingestion into the zvdd. By 2010, SUB Göttingen had migrated the zvdd to a new technical infrastructure that standardized the underlying data format and integrated an OAI interface. As a result, once a collection of digital works has been registered—following a conformity check of its METS/MODS data—all subsequent digitized items from that collection are automatically ingested into the zvdd index.
The project "Technical Enhancement of the Central Register of Digitized Printed Works" (zvdd) aims to integrate additional technical features into the system to increase its value for researchers across all disciplines. Project goals include programming export interfaces for zvdd data, automating metadata validation during new collection registration, developing the capability to include full-text content in the index, optimizing the display of records and search results, and implementing various minor enhancements such as an English user interface, access statistics, and personalized RSS feeds. These technical enhancements transform the zvdd from a simple search portal for digitized printed works into a versatile tool with a wide range of applications: by implementing REST-based retrieval interfaces built on common standards, digital editions and research projects can seamlessly integrate zvdd data, thereby enabling research that transcends organizational and geographical boundaries. The zvdd thus constitutes a central source for numerous virtual research environments.