Open Access

Jüdische Zeitschriften stellen für die Erforschung des jüdischen Kultur-erbes eine unverzichtbare Quelle dar. Vollständige Ausgaben der Periodika sind auf Grund des schlechten Erhaltungszustandes und der Zerstörungen durch Krieg und Nationalsozialismus nur noch in wenigen Bibliotheken vorhanden, so dass ihre Nutzung schwierig ist. Compact Memory bietet als Datenbank weltweit freien Online-Zugang zu den Zeit-schriften in digitalisierter Form an und stellt ein wichtiges Hilfsmittel für die Erforschung der modernen mitteleuropäisch-jüdischen Geschichte dar. 118 verschiedene Titel mit insgesamt circa 700.000 Seiten, welche die unterschiedlichsten Strömungen des Judentums repräsentieren, sind als Grafiken bzw. als Volltext zugänglich, außerdem kann in einer Suchmaske gezielt recherchiert werden. Mit der Aufnahme in das UNESCO Archives Portal hat Compact Memory internationale Anerkennung erlangt.

The University library in Frankfurt/Main owns the largest collection of literature on Judaism and Israel in Germany and one of the major collections in the world. Its task is to document the history of the Jewish people and to serve as a resource for study and research in Germany. The Jewish Division is therefore collecting all relevant national and international publications covering all aspects of post-biblical Judaism and Jewish culture in a most comprehensive manner, as well as all publications on the modern State of Israel. Two databases offer access to the large collections of the Judaica-Division. Yiddish Literature is the database that offers online access to the page images of the outstanding historical Yiddish collection, containing about 800 extremely rare and precious Yiddish and German-Jewish books printed in Hebrew letters from the 16th century onwards. Compact memory is a gateway to more than 100 Jewish periodicals in the German language area published in the 19th and 20th century, providing partly images, partly full-text-search and a bibliographic database of articles. The implementation of a third, new digital project, the »Virtual Judaica-collection« has just started - the digitization and online-presentation of the historical Judaica resources. Formed by his curator Prof. Aron Freimann, it was the largest and most significant Judaica collection on the European continent before the war. The goal is to offer free access to about 18.000 books with 2 Mill. pages over the web. In light of these developments, the presentation will evaluate the current possibilities of German-North-American cooperation in the area of digital projects.

Compact Memory, the internet archive of German Jewish periodicals, provides free global internet access to the vast majority of German-Jewish newspapers and periodicals of the 19th and 20th century. Jewish historical newspapers are the invaluable sources that supply direct and detailed information of the transformation process of Jewry and offer new insights into European Jewish history. The use of these historical sources however is extremely difficult, as complete sets of periodicals are very rarely to be found and they are scattered all over the world in different libraries and archives and in different physical formats (paper, microfilm). Compact Memory contains the 110 most important Jewish German newspapers and periodicals in Central Europe in the period from 1806-1938, covering the complete range of religious, political, social, cultural and academic aspects of Jewish life. The texts are available partly as full-texts, processed by OCR, partly as graphic documents with corresponding index options. The database offers advanced search options, downloading and printing of articles. Thousands of essays of more than 10.000 individual contributors have been bibliographically indexed. Compact Memory was established by the Judaica Division of the University Library Frankfurt am Main and in charge today in cooperation with the Aachen Chair of German-Jewish Literary History and the Cologne library Germania Judaica. Compact Memory is one database within the Digital Collection Judaica which being part of Europeana and other digital portals offers resources for the reconstruction and representation of Jewish cultural heritage.