Welcome to the VD 18 Collection of the Study Centre August Hermann Francke

The project "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 18. Jahrhunderts (VD 18)" (Directory of 18th Century Prints Published in the German Language Area), funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), aims to record, index and digitise all prints published in the German language area as well as all prints in the German language, regardless of their place of publication.

Since the start of the project in 2009, the University and State Library of Saxony-Anhalt (ULB) has been one of the leading libraries in Germany in the realisation of this national project. The funding phase, which runs from 2019 to 2021, has now been set up by the ULB for the first time as a cooperative project and includes the holdings of two other libraries in Halle, the Marienbibliothek and the Library of the Francke Foundations.

The Library of the Francke Foundations owns about 1,700 unique and rare prints of the 18th century, which will be processed in the ULB during the course of the project: This includes cataloguing, digitising and structuring the digital images. The digital copies and metadata will be presented both as separate entries within the collection "Alte Drucke" in the Digital Collections of the Study Centre August Hermann Francke and in the Share_it Repository of the ULB.

The metadata and digital representations will be continuously added to and presented in the Digital Collections of the Study Centre over the course of the project.

To mark the occasion of the project, the Francke Foundations, in cooperation with the Saxony-Anhalt University and State Library, will present the special exhibition "Invitation to the 18th Century. Experiencing book worlds digitally" at the Historisches Waisenhaus from 18 November 2021 to 13 February 2022. The exhibition explains the project, visualizes the workflow from cataloging to digitization to presentation on the WWW, and shows selected prints of this period from the holdings of the three Halle libraries. The exhibition can also be experienced in an online version.