Digital Revolution: Germany's typographic heritage becomes accessible!

Digital Revolution: Germany's typographic heritage becomes accessible!

On April 8, 2025, four important institutions in Germany launched a joint project that aims to digitize the national typographic cultural heritage. They are involved in this project German National Library (DNB), the Art Library – State Museums in Berlin, the Berlin State Library – Prussian Cultural Heritage as well as the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz involved. The goal is to digitize a total of 6,350 historical writing samples and make them available to the public in open access.

These font samples come from the period after 1820, an era in which a variety of printing techniques and forms of typography were developed. Until now, many of these materials were difficult to access. The digitization should be completed within 30 months. The significance of the typeface samples extends to art, book and media history and provides valuable insights into the development of typeface design.

Research innovation and technical solutions

The project will not only digitize historical materials, but also develop a scientifically based classification scheme for the historical printed matter. An important component is the integration of the newly digitized fonts into the Common Authority File (GND), a central database for library metadata.

In order to improve the quality of digitization, artificial intelligence is used, in particular to improve automatic character recognition (OCR). Selected writing samples are transcribed to provide training material for the OCR models. The integration of additional training data from these font samples should help to significantly increase the robustness of the models.

Collaboration for a cultural heritage

The initiative is led by the German Research Foundation (DFG) promotes and combines scientific excellence with digital innovation. A central concern of the project is to make typographic culture visible, which enriches Germany's written heritage. The collections of the participating institutions are characterized by their nationally outstanding scope and quality.

One aspect of the project also includes citizen science elements to help make typographic heritage more accessible and support the development of this heritage. In an earlier project from 2021, which was initiated by the German Technology Museum Berlin Foundation and the Erik Spiekermann Foundation was carried out, over 600 font samples from local foundries before 1951 have already been digitized.

This current collaborative project is intended as a model for an efficient workflow for mass digitization and could serve as the basis for comprehensive digital access to Germany's typographic roots from the incunabula period to the present. The systematic documentation and digitization of the national cultural heritage is significantly advanced through the collaboration of the four institutions.