Open Access Digital Archives

Selected parts of the BBF holdings have been digitized and are openly accessible via the internet. These digital collections have sometimes been compiled in co-operation with other institutions, or the BBF has contributed to digital libraries of partners. All archives are continually being expanded.

Scripta Paedagogica – The Digital Archive of Texts

Scripta Paedagogica is a digital text archive on the history of education in the German-speaking area compiled by the BBF with more than a million digitized pages, which is continually enhanced by the BBF. Scripta Pedagogica contains works covering the period from the 16th to the 20th century, comprising historical journal on education and on religious pedagogy, reference volumes and school school annual reports, monographs, registers of teachers, curricula and children’s books. The collection displays the works as images of printed pages. You can browse the volumes in analogy to the printed publications, browse the digital indexes of contents and download texts in pdf format. The works have been indexed down to the level of essays (articles) and you can thus search for authors and titles.

Scripta Paedagogica

Pictura Paedagogica – The Digital Picture Archive

Pictura Paedagogica is an archive of digitized images on the history of education. It offers roughly 100,000 historical images – book illustrations, picture postcards and photographs. Representations of learning and teaching scenarios, education in the family, interactions of children and adults or sparetime activities of children can be found, and pictures of school buildings and classrooms. Materials that are used as teaching resources present another focus in this database, e.g. geographical maps, science illustrations of plants and wildlife at home and abroad, geodätical images, images concerning physics, astronomy, mathematics, historical events, portraits and many more.

The images are sourced from the BBF holdings, the Institute for Educational Science at the University of  Hildesheim and a few other small collections.

The images have been indexed in a uniform system. You can, for instance, search for motives, epochs and artists, compile lists and order high-resolution images online for publication purposes.

Pictura Paedagogica

Interlinking Pictura – Wiki on Bertuch's "Bilderbuch für Kinder"

Interlinking Pictura presents all twelve volumes of the children's book "Bilderbuchs für Kinder" published by the publisher and patron Friedrich Justin Bertuch (1747–1822) on a Wiki platform. With this richly illustrated textbook released between 1790 and 1830 Bertuch tried to give children an overview of the knowledge of his time: the 1,180 plates show e.g. animals, plants, inventions, discoveries and historical events from all over the world. The Wiki provides images of all plates in good resolution. The plates are indexed. The original, child-oriented explanatory notes in German, French, partially also in English and Italian are available as image and as full text. Users may access the contents for instance by volumes, plates, geographic regions or keywords.

Interested laypersons and scientists of diverse disciplines may now join in enriching the Wiki contents and thereby augmenting the knowledge about the historical publication.

Interlinking Pictura

DigiPortA – The Digital Archive of Portraits

The digital archive of portraits DigiPortA, a cooperation project of nine archives of the Leibniz-Association, indexes 33,000 graphic reproductions, sketches, photographs and paintings of well-known and less known scientists, technicians, architects, artists etc. The images are enriched with descriptions of the persons displayed, and respective artists or photographers. Depending on copyright legislation provisions, digitized images are immediately available online.

From the BBF archive, ca. 300 portraits of individual teachers and pedagogues have been integrated into the database, e.g. photographs of Adelheid Torhorst (1884–1968) and Marie Torhorst (1888–1989), reform pedagogues Hugo Gaudig (1860–1923) and Berthold Otto (1859–1933) or the pedagogue and resistance fighter Adolf Reichwein (1898–1944). The database also indexes images of persons from the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in the GDR and group photographs of teacher associations.

DigiPortA

GEI-Digital – The Digital Archive of Textbooks

GEI-Digital, a digital library of textbooks that is offered by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Media | Georg Eckert Institute (GEI), enables free access to digitized textbooks from the subject areas of geography, politics, history and reading primers. In the context of this project, the BBF has contributed 400 textbooks, with a focus on reading primers. GEI-digital enables thematic searches, queries for authors and titles, publishing houses and places of publication.

GEI-Digital