About Teßmann digital

About the Literature Archive

Which are our partner institutions?

What can I find in the portal Teßmann digital?

How can I use the contents in Teßmann digital?

Can I search the contents in Teßmann digital by keyword?

Whom can I ask for help?

How did the portal Teßmann digital develop?

Newspapers and magazines as historical sources



About Teßmann digital

Teßmann digital is an online platform for the access to historical digitised works from the 18th to the 21st century in German, Ladin and Italian from the collection of the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library and partner institutions. This includes the digitized copies of historical newspapers and magazines, books and artwork (engravings, drawings, sketches, pictures, maps) from the area of the historical Tyrol as well as contributions from the collection on South Tyrolean Literature of the south tyrolean artists' association “Südtiroler Künstlerbund”.

The aim of Teßmann digital is to preserve historical works and to make them freely accessible to a broad public, as well as to simplify research in historical sources.



About the Literature Archive

Since the 1980s, the Documentation Center for recent South Tyrolean Literature, as part of the south tyrolean artists' association “Südtiroler Künstlerbund”, has been collecting newspaper articles, invitations to book presentations and author meetings, as well as reviews on the literary and cultural life in South Tyrol on an area-wide basis. The resulting “Literature Archive”, which focuses on the period after 1945, is one of the first reference points for research on South Tyrolean Literature. In 2014, the approximately 1,200 folders with about 25,000 sheets were digitised with the support of the Foundation “Stiftung Südtiroler Sparkasse” and are freely accessible on the Teßmann digital portal under the menu item "Literature Archive".



Which are our partner institutions?

The digitised material offered in Teßmann digital goes beyond the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library’s own collection. In cooperation with partner institutions, like libraries, archives, publishers, private and public institutions, as well as private collectors, the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library has completed the editions of historical newspapers available on the portal, saving users time-consuming trips to other libraries for research and consultation.

Partner libraries, archives and institutions that have made their collections available for the Teßmann digital newspaper section:



What can I find in the portal Teßmann digital?

  • More than 5,700 books on various subjects, most of which were published before 1900 in the area of the historical Tyrol
  • more than 80 newspapers and magazines from the Alpine region from the 18th to the 21st century
  • more than 2,000 artworks from the Teßmann-Collection
  • more than 24,000 articles from the Literature Archive
(As of March 2023)

The Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library aims to constantly expand the range of digitised historical material in Teßmann digital. To this end, new content is continuously added to the portal.



How can I use the contents in Teßmann digital?

The access to the contents of the portal is free and possible without registration. The use is free of charge and in accordance with the Creative-Commons-Attribution-NonCommercial-4.0-International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Note on access to copyrighted content:

Due to the applicable copyright law, not all content available in Teßmann digital can be published online. These contents are accessible exclusively on site in the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library’s intranet. This concerns mainly issues of newspapers and magazines published less than 70 years ago.

The digitised copies can be displayed in the standard view (low resolution) or in high resolution. It is possible to download and/or print the entire image of a digital file or only a fragment of it in a PDF or JPEG format.

In the backoffice area, search results can be saved individually and accessed at any time.



Can I search the contents in Teßmann digital by keyword?

Yes, it is possible to search the contents in Teßmann digital by keyword. For this purpose, a full text search for keywords of all OCR-indexed files is available (OCR = optical character recognition). The full text search is available for the entire collection of full texts in the areas of books, newspapers and journals as well as the Literature Archive. The search term is displayed by highlighting the respective keywords in the scan and by displaying an excerpt of the full text containing the search term.

Note on the quality of automatic text recognition:

During the process of automatic full text recognition, some factors can complicate the correct recognition of the original text, such as the font (e.g. Fraktur script – German type) or the state of the scanned material (thin, transparent, dirty, yellowed or damaged paper as well as dust particles or little hairs on the microfilm images, very tightly bound books, etc.). Thus, the results of the automatic text recognition do not offer absolute compliance with the texts of the original documents. This can also affect the hit accuracy of a full text search in Teßmann digital.

The Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library was involved in the following two projects, which aimed at improving the results of automatic text recognition and at creating further ways of search access:



Whom can I ask for help?

Please send your questions, ideas, suggestions or similar to info@tessmann.it.



How did the portal Teßmann digital develop?

2006-2008: The "Digital Newspaper Archive" on the Intranet of the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library

In 2006, the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library began to digitise its historical newspaper collections from the Alpine region. In 2007 the collections were made accessible on the Library’s intranet. The main motivation was on the one hand to preserve the cultural heritage and protect the originals, and on the other hand to offer easier access through one single portal.

In order to provide newspaper collections that are as complete as possible, materials from partner institutions and private collectors have been digitised.

2008-2012: The "Digital Newspaper Archive" on the Internet

The amount of digitised newspapers kept rising, and thus, the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library decided to present them in a separate internet portal. The so called “Digital Newspaper Archive” was developed and put online in 2008, giving access to more than 20 newspapers.

In the beginning the focus laid on works from the 19th century, but by now also more recent newspapers like “Dolomiten” or “Neue Südtiroler Tageszeitung” are provided. For copyright reasons however, the issues of the past 70 years are solely accessible on the Library’s intranet.

2012-2014: The "Digital Library”

In 2012, the "Digital Newspaper Archive" was expanded in that the portal no longer exclusively offered historical newspapers from the Tyrolean region, but also selected historical books and artwork. In 2012, about 1,200 digitised books, that is mostly Tyrolean literature from the 19th and the early 20th century, and 1,600 pieces of artwork from the "Teßmann Collection" were added to the portal and the navigation was adapted: On August 1st 2012, the "Digital Library" went online. Since then, further 5,000 additional works have been added.

2014-2023: „Teßmann digital“

Since the offered scans of newspapers and books on the portal were pure image files, they could not be searched by keywords, but had to be browsed individually - just like their originals in paper form. After 2012, the Dr. Friedrich Teßmann Library sought to realize the automated text recognition (OCR = optical character recognition) of the newspaper and book collections and worked with Alpin GmbH to further develop the portal and the implementation of full text search. The result of these efforts was the portal Teßmann digital, which enabled full text search in large part of the more than 230,000 digitised documents and 3,310,000 scanned pages.

2023: Relaunch „Teßmann digital“

In March 2023, Teßmann digital was relaunched with a new look and additional functionalities. The aim of the relaunch was to create added value for users through improved navigation, expanded search functions, increased usability of the full texts, and the integration and processing of all results of previous digitisation and OCR projects (e.g. DiÖSS, OPATCH, Zeit.shift).

The relaunch of the portal also saw an expansion of the digitised collections: As of March 2023, more than 262,000 documents and 3,620,000 pages are available and freely accessible online.



Newspapers and magazines as historical sources

As memory institutions, libraries have the responsibility to preserve cultural textual heritage and keep it accessible. Historical newspapers in particular are valuable sources of regional and local history and provide an insight into past events and views. The historical newspapers and articles digitised in the portal Teßmann digital can be assigned to different world views and political movements. They are not subject to any evaluation, censorship, or the like. In this context, however, the portal Teßmann digital distances itself from all discriminatory, violence-glorifying and National Socialist content.