Subject Guides: Open Access Resources in German Studies (OARGS): Directories

This section itemizes all-encompassing topical, discipline-specific, pedagogical or geographical finding aids for Open Access materials relevant for German Studies within the categories listed. It also includes information on the Open Access movement and how it can be used.
Pausing your cursor over the information logo gives you a resource description.
Please send your suggestions for additional open access resources for German Studies to Richard Hacken (hacken@byu.edu).

Information about "Open" Resources

Creative Commons Licensing Terms Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. Here are a few easily understood licensing details worth knowing about.
Open Access - Der freie Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information A thorough explanation about the meaning, strategies, types and repositories of open access resources. Discipline-specific information, e.g. for History, Linguistics and Philology. German and English interfaces.
What is Open Access? A short explanation of the need for open access, how it operates, and what it makes possible. By the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

General Guides

Digital Collections in German Studies Research guide to digital materials relevant for the study of German-speaking countries. Sponsored by the European Studies Section (ESS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).
invenio - Deutsches Bundesarchiv A search in the Federal Archives that can be limited to digitized materials. Documents also organized by time periods and specialized collections. German and English interfaces.
Mason OER Metafinder (MOM) A federated search machine across 21 distinct OA search machines. Powerful boolean possibilities, but it takes some time to learn the ropes for filtering down to specific aspects of German Studies.
Open Access Resources for Modern Languages A variety of OA resources compiled by the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) at the University of London. Around a dozen German Studies items are listed.
Wikisource - Digitale Sammlungen (Digital Collections) From the German side of Wikisource, this list includes digital collections internationally, each of which makes available at least one public-domain German-language book. Overseen by Dr. Klaus Graf, a respected digital site organizer.

Digital Collections

austrian literature online - alo Thousands of digital books, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, theses and scholarly essays from the 11th century to the present, most related to Austria. A cooperative venture between the universities of Innsbruck, Graz and Linz. German and English interfaces.
Center for Research Libraries - Digital Collections Catalog While CRL is a member consortium, the digital collections are open access. You can search by keywords, title, author, subject, Library of Congress call numbers, etc. The collection has strong holdings for foreign dissertations and more.
Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library) A catalog to tens of millions of German books and other objects, of which about a third are digitally accessible (quickly identifiable via a search filter). Sponsored by the German National Library. German and English interfaces.
e-Helvetica (Swiss Digital Collections) This portal to the digital collections of the Swiss National Library contains historical websites, electronic books, journals, academic publications and digitized printed works. Full-text search is available for all. German, French, Italian and English interfaces.
Erlanger Liste - Digitale Texte Links to German online literary texts, text collections, genres, etc.
German Studies Collaboratory An online compendium of educational resources in various sub-disciplines falling under the umbrella of German Studies. Separate "Teaching Hub," "Media Hub" and "Digital Hub." While all resources in this guide can be used for education, this particular collection is an exemplary OER (Open Education Resource).
Germanistik im Netz (GiNDok) "Open Access für die Germanistik" is the subtitle of this repository. And what a repository it is! Sponsored by the Goethe University, Frankfurt a. M. in league with the DFG (German Research Foundation). Also aligned with GiNGuide (online tutorials) and GiNLab (Digital Research Laboratory).
Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum (Digitization Center of the State and University Library at Göttingen) A digital library of over 15 million pages, comprising online versions of print works, manuscripts and images. Of particular interest are the VD17 (17th century) and VD18 (18th century) collections.
HathiTrust Digital Library A long-term preservation collective of public-domain titles. German provides, after English, the second largest number of works. PDF facsimiles of originals and well as their transcriptions are available for downloading. A separate HathiTrust research corpus makes linguistic data from 18 million books available.
Internet Archive Internet Archive is a (self-described) "non-profit library of millions of freely accessible books, movies, software, music, websites and more." It is also the jumping-off point for the Wayback Machine, which revisits Internet pages from the past.
MDZ - Münchener Digitalisierungszentrum (Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library) Roughly three million digitized manuscripts, prints, music, maps, photographs, newspapers and magazines from the collections of the Bavarian State Library. German and English interfaces.
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Digitalisierte Sammlungen (Digitized Collections of the Berlin State Library ) Digitized collections of the Berlin State Library (Prussian Cultural Holdings). Search interface can be filtered by disciplines (e.g. Politics and Society, History and Geography, Languages and Literatures). German and English interfaces.

Guides to Institutional Repositories

OpenDOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories) Hosted by JISC, this global directory of open access repositories can be browsed by country, institution, authors, and other search terms. Listed at latest count are 281 repositories for Germany, 46 for Austria, 35 for Switzerland, 315 for the UK and 907 for the US.
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) Another British repository list, ROAR aims to provide timely updates on repositories around the world. IN general, the numbers of repositories approximate those in OpenDOAR. Unlike the latter, ROAR allows for crowdsourcing.