Rostock – One of the central elements of our project is the digitisation of historical documents. Once processed, they are to be made accessible to a wider public, for example through the Digital Library of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. To ensure that the digital copies can be found later, they are given a kind of profile in the Goobi archive software containing all the key information, known as metadata.

What may look at first glance like “simply typing things up” is often real detective work. The colleague in the photo is currently working through old documents that have already been scanned and filtering out specific information, such as names, places and dates.

Step by step, this turns partly hard-to-read records into a structured collection that can be used digitally.

(State Office for Roads and Transport MV)