Wikidata:WikiProject 20th Century Press Archives

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The heritage of the 20th Century Press Archives (Q36948990) (PM20) is a large collection of folders with millions of press clippings and other material about persons, organizations, wares, events and general subjects. Founded in 1908 in Germany, it soon extended its coverage to newspapers all over the world. To our best knowledge, it is the world's most comprehensive public press archives and thus a unique source for politics, business and social life in the 20th century.

Aim and scope

This WikiProject strives to

1. link all folders of the collection to Wikidata, providing access to sources to Wikimedia projects and the general public
2. add metadata from the folders (e.g., persons' birth dates) to the linked Wikidata items

The individual documents within the folders, as well as the folders with no available online documents, are considered out of scope of this project. This may change in the future.

Background

The archives have been open to the public since their foundation (with restrictions in regard to foreign sources during the Nazi era). Its owner, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (Q317179), has digitized the clippings from the first half of the 20th century in a DFG-funded project and stepwise published the material online at Pressemappe 20. Jahrhundert (still incomplete). In 2018, ZBW has put all PM20 metadata under a CC0 license and is aiming at a data donation to Wikidata.

More information at w:20th Century Press Archives (same in German). See also List of newspaper clippings archives.

Presentations

• 20th Century Press Archives Goes Wikidata, Archivcamp at Deutscher Archivtag, Rostock 2018 (in English)
• Pressemappe 20. Jahrhundert: Personen- und Firmendossiers, Coding da Vinci, Mainz 2018 (in German, with according data publication)
• Wikidata as opportunity for special collections: the 20th Century Press Archives use case, presentation at LIBER 2019 (LOD working group of the Association of European Research Libraries)
• 20th Century Press Archives: Data donation to Wikidata (ZBW Labs Blog entry, 2019), 2nd part: countries/subjects (2021), 3rd part: companies/organizations (2021), 4th part: commodities/wares (2022)
• Linking the 20th century paper history to the sum of all knowledge (Best practices presentation at DCMI Virtual 2020)
• Accessible material of 20th Century Press Archives largely extended (ZBW Labs blog entry - first steps to integrate material from digitized microfilms, January 2024)

Next steps

1. Create items for the remaining unlinked person folders (more than 90 % of these with online documents are already linked!) DONE and add sourced metadata from the folder descriptions to linked items lacking that information DONE.
2. Develop a structure for representing PM20 folders about general subjects from the "Länder/Sacharchiv" DONE.
3. Propose properties DONE and implement structure DONE (result as subject folders map)
4. Turn to the companies and organizations archives, create structures and map the folders to existing WD items DONE (result as companies folders map)
5. Create structures for the wares archives, and create items for folders DONE (result as graphical overview)

How to contribute

• Link PM20 folders to Wikidata items via Mix-n-Match:
  • Newspapers (zdb)
• Have a look into the wares archives, link some of its folders to Wikidata items, and think about how to represent the entirety of its folders in Wikidata
• If you find errors in the data, which should be fixed upstream, please notify [email protected].

Participants

[+] Add yourself to the list

The participants listed below can be notified using the following template in discussions:
{{Ping project|20th Century Press Archives}}

• Jneubert (talk) 08:13, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
• Maxwan (talk) 15:00, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
• YULdigitalpreservation (talk) 13:12, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
• Mfchris84 (talk) 14:59, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

Related WikiProjects

• Companies, Organizations
• Historical Place
• European Colonialism
• Periodicals, Books, Datasets, Source MetaData, Wikipedia Sources