metadata

license: cc0-1.0
task_categories:
  - text-classification
  - feature-extraction
language:
  - de
  - la
  - el
  - fr
tags:
  - metadata
  - cultural heritage
  - library sciences
  - machine learning
  - data science
pretty_name: vd-metadata
size_categories:
  - 1M<n<10M
configs:
  - config_name: VD-Bib-Metadata
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: VD-Bib-Metadata.parquet
  - config_name: VD-Digi-Metadata
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: VD-Digi-Metadata.parquet

Metadata of the "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienen Drucke"

Title

Description and Motivation

This data publication was created with the intent to provide bibliographic and subject indexing metadata for research purposes and the development of AI applications. This data publication can be regarded as the German national bibliography of the period 1500–1800. It consists of two files: The first one provides all bibliographic master records pertaining to the German national bibliography which were edited and revised and electronically copied to the union catalogue K10plus, the shared database of the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg (BSZ) and the Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG). The second one lists the unique identifiers ("Pica-Produktionsnummer") of all master records available in the union catalogue K10plus which have been digitised, and it contains the links to their digital copies.

The first bibliographic file comprises descriptive metadata of 750.342 titles. They result from three separate projects aiming at establishing a retrospective German national bibliography for the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. The data are stored in columnar format, containing 174 columns. They were downloaded in February 2025 from the K10plus and represent a work in progress. Exemplary tasks which can be served by this file comprise studies on the history of books between 1500 and 1800 and on pattern recognition on the basis of bibliographical metadata. The second file ("digital copies") comprises 16 columns of 590.528 titles which are available in digitised form.

The primary intention for this data publication was the provision of a large computationally amenable dataset exclusively consisting of bibliographic metadata to stimulate research and development of AI applications. In 2025, large (meta-)datasets from the field of historical cultural data are still missing. In this respect, the data publication provided here aims to fill a gap. The files are suitable for the computational use of digitised and born-digital collections according to the Collections as Data principles.

The data publication was created by two librarians and a member of the team of the research project "Mensch.Maschine.Kultur – Künstliche Intelligenz für das Digitale Kulturelle Erbe" at Berlin State Library (SBB). The research project was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM), project grant no. 2522DIG002. The Minister of State for Culture and the Media is part of the German Federal Government.

Homepage

Not applicable.

Repository

Zenodo Community: Data and Demos of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library

Papers and/or Other References

Not applicable.

Publisher

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library

Point of Contact

Maria Federbusch, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library, [email protected]

Remigiusz Stachowiak, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library, [email protected], ORCID: 0000-0002-1889-0502

Jörg Lehmann, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library, [email protected], ORCID: 0000-0003-1334-9693

Supported Tasks and Shared Tasks

There are at least two tasks for which the bibliographic dataset may be used:

Task "history of books between 1500 and 1800". See as an example Lathi et al, 2019
Task "pattern recognition on the basis of bibliographical metadata". Such patterns could be used for retrieval augmented generation of metadata. See as an example Völker et al, 2024

This dataset was not part of a shared task.

AI Category

Natural Language Processing, Feature Extraction

Type of Cultural Heritage Application

Metadata enrichment

(Cultural Heritage) Application Example

Retrieval Augmented Generation

Distribution

This dataset is distributed by the three named dataset curators. Dissemination on the publication was done via social media in order to reach the relevant research and machine learning communities. Furthermore, the library community within Germany has been informed about the publication of this dataset.

Dataset Curators

The dataset was curated and published by two librarians employed at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library as well as one member of the research project "Mensch.Maschine.Kultur" ("Human.Machine.Culture"):

Maria Federbusch, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library. Maria Federbusch has studied librarianship and electrical engineering. She works as a research librarian in the Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books at the Berlin State Library and is responsible for project and science management.

Remigiusz Stachowiak, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library. Remigiusz Stachowiak has studied history, Eastern European studies and edition philology. He holds a doctorate in late medieval history. He is a research librarian in the Department of Manuscripts and Early Printed Books at Berlin State Library.

Jörg Lehmann, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Berlin State Library. Jörg Lehmann has studied history and comparative literature and works in the research project "Mensch.Maschine.Kultur"; he was responsible for downloading the data, curating them as described, and drafting the datasheet.

All curators can be contacted with regard to an update or feedback to the datasheet and regarding technical issues. The curators are prepared to incorporate responses and comments into a new version of the datasheet if this deems sensible.

Licensing Information

Creative Commons Zero v1.0 – CC0 1.0 Universal

Citation Information

@dataset{federbusch_2025_15167939,
  author       = {Federbusch, Maria and
                  Stachowiak, Remigiusz and
                  Lehmann, Jörg},
  title        = {Metadata of the "Verzeichnis der im deutschen
                   Sprachraum erschienen Drucke"
                  },
  month        = apr,
  year         = 2025,
  publisher    = {Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Berlin State Library},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.15167939},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15167939},
}

Contributions

The data contained in the dataset have been compiled by trained librarians over a long period of time and are therefore a typical result of carefully crafted metadata from several cultural heritage institutions. The selection, transformation and curation of the dataset was performed with the goal to provide a computer-amenable dataset to both the research and machine learning communities.

The "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke" is a joint effort by German VD libraries, pan-European libraries since 1969 as well as all contributors to the central library system (CBS) / the K10plus database, through which the title data were retrieved in electronic form. However, this data publication transcends traditional librarian formats and provides a computer-amenable dataset.

Composition

In Germany, three separate cooperative projects exist to catalogue all prints for the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. The full title of these three projects are: "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des 16. Jahrhunderts" (in English: Register of printed works of the 16th century published in German-speaking countries, abbreviated VD16); "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 17. Jahrhunderts" (in English: Union catalogue of books printed in German-speaking countries in the 17th century, abbreviated VD17, also available as a database VD17); and "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke des 18. Jahrhunderts" (in English: Union catalogue of books printed in German-speaking countries in the 18th century, abbreviated VD18, also available as a database VD18). All the three projects are funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).

Taken together, the three projects VD16, VD17 and VD18 aim to establish a retrospective German national bibliography for the period from 1501 to 1800. Included are all German-language items as well as any work printed and published in the German speaking countries of the time, regardless of its language. As of February 2025, the VD16 comprises about 106,000 titles, the VD17 lists about 315,000 items, and the VD18 about 295,000 titles. None of the projects have yet been completed. The VD16 started in 1969 and was released as a printed library catalogue; this project is directed by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München. VD17 was conceived as a database from the beginning and started in 1996 and VD18 in 2009. Only the latter aimed at digitisation from its very inception. In the meantime, all three projects are aiming at a complete digitisation of the recorded titles. However, the three projects differ in their approaches: While VD16 and VD17 aim at recording all known copies of an edition, in VD18 only one copy per edition is included. In this way, possible variations in prints are taken into account for the VD16 and VD17, while the increase in book production in the 18th century prevents the digitization of multiple variants. Another peculiarity is the fact that the works were recorded according to three different systems: Guidelines for VD16, RAK and RDA. Genre terms were consistently used only in the VD17 and VD18.

The union catalogue K10plus merges the databases of the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg (BSZ) and the Verbundzentrale des Gemeinsamen Bibliotheksverbundes (VZG). The revised national bibliographic master records from the VD16 and VD17 projects are available in the K10plus as external data. In the VD18 project, master records are also captured directly in the K10plus or imported into the K10plus database from other union databases.

For the purpose of this data publication, the records of the three VD projects were taken together, thus forming a large data publication consisting exclusively of revised metadata. The dataset was created by systematically downloading all relevant titles of the VD16, VD17 and VD18 in February 2025 from the K10plus; it also includes data collected within the union and made available via the K10plus database. This having said, the German federal system has to be taken into respect as well as the fact that not every German library participates in the VD projects. These circumstances lead to the result that not every title which has been recorded in Germany has been revised and is therefore available in the K10plus database. The fact that the absolute number of titles contained in this dataset exceeds the sum of the three VD’s as given above can best be understood if it is taken into account that the dataset also comprises the complete recording of a multi-part monograph, the parts of monographic series as well as journals and dependent works. This latter term (in contrast to independent literature or monographs) refers to printed publications such as included publications or songs that are part of a larger work.

The first file ("bibliography") comprises 750.342 revised titles with ample metadata, which are sorted into 174 columns. Here, all edited and revised titles of prints from VD16, VD17 and VD18 from K10plus are merged into one file. The file contains not only monographs and journals and their individual units, but also so-called included or attached (dependent) works. The dataset contains bibliographic data and subject indexing data, but no description of the individual book copies, since these are only recorded in K10plus from the two library networks GBV and SWB. The inclusion of these data would distort the overall picture of copy records, since the book copies from other library networks are not taken into account here (e.g. copy records from Bavaria). The search syntax in K10plus (WinIBW userface) for the file described here is as follows: f sbn ((vd16? or vd17? or vd18?) bbg a!v?) or (vrb redvd18? bbg asv?). This expression can be translated as follows: find all bibliographic numbers of the edited and revised titles of the three VDs or find all records of the edited and revised dependent works of the VD18.

The second file ("digital copies") contains the records of the prints from VD16, VD17 and VD18 that have been digitized. Due to the different data models of the VDs, the search query must be adapted to the individual databases. From the data pools of VD16 and VD17, only titles containing links to digital copies will be included. From the VD18, the so-called o-records (records of the digital copies) are taken into account. This file also contains not only monographs and journals and their individual units, but also so-called included or attached (dependent) works. The search syntax in the K10plus (WinIBW userface) for the second file described here is as follows: f sbn ((vd18? bbg (o!v? or o!u?)) or (vrb redvd18? bbg os?)) or sbn ((vd16? or vd17?) bbg a!v?)). This expression can be translated as follows: find all bibliographic numbers of the edited and revised titles with their digital records of the VD18 or find all bibliographic numbers of the edited and revised dependent works of the VD18 or find all records of the edited and revised titles of VD16 and VD17. From the resulting dataset all titles were removed which did not contain any information about a digital copy.

The second file comprises 590.528 observations of 16 variables. It contains the unique identifier "Pica-Produktionsnummer", the identifier of each VD ("VD-Nummer"), references to the physical copy of the book, links to digital copies, in rare cases also rights or licence information and access status. It thus serves as a concordance between the bibliographic file and the currently available digital copies.

The tasks for which this dataset may be used are studies on the history of books between 1501 and 1800 and on pattern recognition on the basis of bibliographical metadata. The intention for the creation of this dataset was to provide a substantial and at the same time delimited dataset comprising the German national bibliography as exhaustive as possible in early 2025. The language used in the dataset is German; however, as the names of the three VD’s indicate ("Union catalogue of books printed in German speaking countries"), the titles described in the dataset may be in other languages as well, such as Latin, Greek, and others.

The dataset consists of two files (VD-Bib-Metadata.parquet and VD-Digi-Metadata.parquet) as well as the accompanying datasheet. Both files fully comply with the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The dataset does not contain information that is under copyright. The files exclusively comprise textual information and links. Authors and people who are subject of the listed titles are named and often linked to authority files, especially to the authority file Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND). Since the time frame covered by the dataset ends with the year 1800 and, in the case of journals and multipart monographs around 1810, the dataset does not contain any personal or sensitive information which relate to people who are still living or have been living until 70 years ago.

Data Category

text files

Object Type

metadata

Dataset Structure

Within the databases of the Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Württemberg (BSZ) and Verbundzentrale des GBV (VZG) / the K10plus database, bibliographic information is provided in machine-readable form separated into fields. An overview of most of these fields as well as instructions on how information was inserted into each field can be found here (in German language only). Data for the more than 750,000 titles were transformed from the format available in the K10plus into a columnar format, where each of the fields forms an individual column. In the K10plus database, the field names are given in the form of four digits. For a better readability of the table, the field names used in the documentation were added to these four digits.

The dataset does not contain data splits which can be used for machine learning tasks. It is advisable to first analyse the dataset and then perform the split(s), for example to split off portions of the dataset which pertain to one of the three project centuries. Records pertaining to either VD16, VD17 or VD18 are identifiable, since they contain a VD-number in the respective column ("2190 VD16-Nummer", "2191 VD17-Nummer", or "2192 VD18-Nummer").

Data Instances

For nearly every column, there can be found information in the documentation on how to interpret the content and resolve the keys used in every field. Field "1500 Sprachcodes", for example, holds the information of the language of the publication in ISO 639-2/B format, e.g. ger, lat, grc, fre. Moreover, further information has been inserted separated by a $ and a lower-case letter. The entry "lat$agrc$ager" contains the separator $a and can be read as "the languages of the publication are Latin, Greek and German", while it is not specified how much text is covered by each of these languages ($a indicates the language of the text). The entry "ger$clat" can be read as "the language of the publication is German, but the original text is in Latin".

Data Fields

Most fields (or columns) are described in the documentation. However, there are fields which are essential for the understanding of this dataset. A key element in this dataset are Pica Production Numbers (PPNs). PPNs are unique identifiers used for individual entities; in the dataset, they are surrounded by exclamation marks (!..!) and are thus machine-readable. They are related to titles as well as to authorities. To provide some illuminating examples: the physical work with the PPN 567660303 noted in field "0100 Pica-Produktionsnummer" contains a reference to the digital edition bearing the PPN 858908824; the latter information can be found in field "4243 Beziehungen auf Manifestationsebene". Furthermore, the main contributor to the text, Andreas Wenzel, has received the PPN 080488994. This PPN can be used to retrieve information about Andreas Wenzel via the online catalogue (https://gvk.k10plus.de/DB=2.1/PPNSET?PPN=080488994), or in the form of a xml file in DublinCore or MODS format. Wenzel’s PPN is given in field "3000 Person/Familie als 1. geistiger Schöpfer", alongside with his GND number 120161052. Furthermore, PPNs are used to characterise this work, e.g. by providing information on the type of content (field "1131 Art des Inhalts"), in this case PPN 106394134 for "Anthologie" (corresponding to GND 4002214-6), or information on the genre, PPNs 096632232 for "Lyrik" and 096631643 "Gelegenheitsschrift:Hochzeit"; the latter two can be found in field "5570 Gattungsbegriffe bei Alten Drucken" (genre terms in old prints). A comprehensive list of these genre terms can be found here.

Field "0500 Bibliografische Gattung und Status" (bibliographic genre and status) holds information on whether a title was recorded referring to its physical form (A) or to its electronic form (O), on its bibliographic frequency (a for single units, c for the recording of a multi-part monograph, f for a volume of it, b for a journal, v for a journal volume), and on its status (v for bibliographical completeness and cataloguing in autopsy). Fields 2190, 2191 and 2192 ("VD16-Nummer", "VD17-Nummer", or "VD18-Nummer") hold the IDs used by the three VD16, VD17 and VD18 projects respectively. Field "5301 Basisklassifikation" uses the BK (Basisklassifikation), another classification system extensively used for subject indexing. Field "1100 Erscheinungsdatum/Entstehungsdatum" gives information on the date of publication or creation, field "4040 Normierter Ort" on the place of publication in standardised form.

Compliance with Standard

The standard used in the K10plus is PICA+, an xml standard. However, to enable better ingestion and processing, both files were converted to the columnar format .parquet.

Data Splits

Not applicable.

Languages

The languages most often represented in the bibliographic file (i.e. the language of the publications listed there) are German (ger), Latin (lat), Ancient Greek (grc), Modern Greek (gre), Low German (nds), French (fre), Hebrew (heb), English (eng), Italian (ita). Beyond these, more than hundred other languages are represented as well. See the column "1500 Sprachcodes" in the file, which specifies the language of the publication in ISO 639-2/B format. This field also describes in detail the diverse combinations of languages characterising each individual title, as well as it indicates whether the title is a translation and from which language it was translated.

Descriptive Statistics

The bibliographic file comprises 750.342 observations of 174 variables. In other words: 750.342 titles published between 1500 and roughly 1800 are described in 174 columns. The columns are sparsely populated. Most of the columns are of the data type "character" due to additional, character-based codes within field contents, derived from the custom internal data format called PICA+. The column "0100 Pica-Produktionsnummer", which holds the unique key for each title, is also in character format, because some of the keys contain an "X". File size is 487 MB (511.651.840 Bytes).

The second file ("digital copies") comprises 590.528 observations of 16 variables. It contains the unique identifier "Pica-Produktionsnummer", the identifier of each VD ("VD-Nummer"), references to the physical copy of the book, links to digital copies, in rare cases also rights or licence information and access status. It thus serves as a concordance between the bibliographic file and the digital copies available in February 2025. File size is 105 MB (110.825.472 Bytes).

Data Collection Process

The idea behind the decision to collect all the titles listed in the VD16, VD17 and VD18 was to compile a reasonably large dataset of bibliographic metadata which is at the same time delimitable and is the product of more than 50 years of librarian’s work. The criteria of whether or not a title is added to one of the three VDs can be found on the websites of each VD cited above. The bibliographic metadata contained in this dataset were established by trained librarians. As hundreds of libraries participate in the federated system, the dataset was established collaboratively, is extremely rich and saturated, and the data collected are of a high quality.

Alternative datasets with similar characteristics would be national bibliographies of other European nation-states since the beginning of book printing in the late 15th century. A comprehensive publication of such metadata might enable similar studies and tasks as have been described for the present dataset.

Curation Rationale

The lack of massive datasets with bibliographic metadata motivated the creation of this dataset. Curation of the dataset was performed with great care with the intent to keep as much information as possible while discarding some fields/columns due to them being sparsely populated.

Source Data

Initial Data Collection and Normalisation

The two files were systematically downloaded from the K10plus database in February 2025; both downloads were each consolidated into a single table. With regard to the bibliographic file, some columns were sorted out during the process of consolidation. In the vast majority of the cases, the decision for deletion was taken on a statistical basis: A column containing less than 750 entries (0,1% of the length of the file) seemed dispensable with regard to the fact that 750.342 entries could be there. Further reasons for the dismissal of columns were the fact that they are relevant only for internal purposes (e.g., the date of the last change of the bibliographic description) or where it was clear that they resulted from obvious mistakes.

No normalisation of any data was performed.

Source Data Producers

The source data were produced by trained librarians over the course of the past 55 years, i.e. starting from 1969. The titles to be included in the three VD’s were carefully selected, and the source data were created by librarians under changing rules and standards such as the "Regeln für die alphabetische Katalogisierung (RAK)"" and the "Resource Description and Access". VD16 was recorded according to its own system of rules. Since the data result from changing rules and standards, they are not homogeneous which may have consequences for their analysis. It is notable that this dataset does not only document a significant volume and diversity of publications, but is the result of centuries-long processes of preservation of relevant historical titles, and of data collection conducted with care.

Digitisation Pipeline

Not applicable.

Preprocessing and Cleaning

Beyond the data cleaning described above in the section "Initial Data Collection and Normalisation", no preprocessing of both files has been undertaken. The conversion of the files to the columnar arrow format was performed with the aim to alleviate ingestion of the dataset for machine learning purposes. If there was more than one entry in a field, the entries were concatenated and are presented within square brackets, with commas separating the individual entries.

Annotations

Not applicable.

Annotation Process

Not applicable.

Annotators

Not applicable.

Crowd Labour

Not applicable.

Data Provenance

The provenance of the data is the database management system CBS (Central Library System), which contains the data of the K10plus database of the library networks GBV (Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund) and SWB (Südwestdeutscher Bibliotheksverbund). Alternatively, the data could have been retrieved in various library formats via the SRU-API of the GBV, the SRU-APIs of the K10plus, of the VD17 or VD18. Furthermore, the data of the VD17 is available as a dump in JSON format on GitHub. The licence generally attached to bibliographic metadata is CCO.

Use of Linked Open Data, Controlled Vocabulary, Multilingual Ontologies/Taxonomies

The dataset contains links to several authority file types (persons, places, subjects) like the Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND), and to classification systems such as the Nederlandse basisclassificatie BK (Basisklassifikation). The classification was performed by the librarians who created the bibliographic record. The Basisklassifikation is usually linked via an PPN; e.g., the PPN 106403877 is used for the Basisklassifikation identifier 11.50 pointing to church history, as it is used in this title. Links to the GND collected within the Culturegraph project were transferred to the union catalogue and can be found in sub-fields $K and $v of the 3000 fields and the field "1131 Art des Inhalts" field in machine-generated form.

Version Information

This is the first version of the dataset, which was collected in February 2025. All the three VD’s are work in progress, and newly recorded or digitised titles are continually added, which augments the dataset. Even though the "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachraum erschienenen Drucke" is limited to the period 1501 to 1800, that does not mean that the number of titles contained in it stops to grow. Especially the VD18 continues to grow since an important amount of works from that period are currently being digitized. However, it is currently not planned to publish an updated and enlarged version of all the titles contained in the three VD’s.

Release Date

2025-04-08

Date of Modification

Not applicable.

Checksums

MD5 and SHA256 hashes of the file VD-Bib-Metadata.parquet:

MD5: 513ad5441d76ade910902a2b7a339776

SHA256: cca861b112b15f2f18cb9b6b041e08ff135809deb3bad8637886a59de81b0bbe

MD5 and SHA256 hashes of the file VD-Digi-Metadata.parquet:

MD5: 653bf7ae7daef840038ef3f7c8d9cb28

SHA256: 87f3d059651c4dbd5ceaca28ecf6f00f213a1934ddcd71fc0a9d13f69c9e62fe

Update Periodicity

Not applicable.

Maintenance

The maintenance of this dataset is limited. The data will not be updated, but any technical issues will be addressed during the lifetime of the research project "Mensch.Maschine.Kultur", in the context of which this dataset was established. The project ends in June 2025, and the dataset will be maintained at least until then.

The dataset consists of two files (VD-Bib-Metadata.parquet and VD-Digi-Metadata.parquet) as well as the accompanying datasheet. The .parquet format enables large amounts of data to be processed and moved quickly. It is a specific data format that stores data in a columnar memory layout and has been developed by Apache Arrow. Libraries are available for C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Julia, MATLAB, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust.

Examples and Considerations for Using the Data

The dataset is suitable to serve the two tasks described above. Further possible uses are the creation of a knowledge graph out of the PPNs contained in the dataset and the related data which can be retrieved online as described above. Furthermore, the dataset can be used to examine the metadata diversity, the data quality, and its potential to be transformed into linked open data. People using this dataset are welcome to provide feedback on this dataset and of the uses made of it to the dataset curators.

Ethical Considerations

Personal and Other Sensitive Information

The dataset does not contain personal or sensitive information beyond what is available in international authority files anyway. Since the youngest titles contained in this dataset were printed in the early 19th century, the dataset does not contain any sensitive data in the sense of contemporary privacy laws.

Discussion of Biases

With regard to social biases, it should be noted that the creators of the titles contained in the bibliographic file have been members of a small literate elite of their times; they belonged e.g. to university, the clergy, or the administration. The vast majority of these creators were male.

As can be easily imagined, book production started in the early 16th century on a low level and increased continually over time. Therefore, an uneven distribution of works published over time is observable. Reformation and protestantism in the 16th and especially the 17th century are reflected in the dominance of print production located in Eastern Germany. With regard to the 18th century, it has to be noted that this bibliography is far from complete, because the project VD18 started only in 2009 and is therefore the youngest of the three. Seen against this background, the absolute numbers of titles published in the 17th and especially in the 18th century as compared to the other two centuries is by now far from being complete.

With regard to the regional distribution of the places where the titles listed in the bibliography file have been printed, two biases are noteworthy: First of all, the boundaries of what is now known as "Germany" constantly shifted within the last 500 years. Moreover, the emphasis on individual towns changed over time. While Wittenberg was an important center of book printing in the 16th century, a significant decrease of output has to be noted until the late 18th century for this town. In this respect, the database may serve as a source of further, especially quantitative, analysis. Secondly, as has been noted above, the three projects were funded by the German Research Foundation over different time periods, and only libraries located in the unified Germany after 1990 received funding; therefore, ecclesiastical and archival holdings are mostly absent. The focus of the "catalogue of prints published in the German-speaking world" overrepresented places of printing which now lie in the Federal Republic of Germany in its borders after 1990 or, formulated the other way around, the bibliographic file underrepresents works printed in Alsace, Switzerland, Austria and the former Prussian Provinces Pommerania, Silesia as well as West and East Prussia. Printing places like e.g. Stettin (Szczecin), Breslau (Wrocław) or Königsberg (Kaliningrad) are therefore underrepresented. These printing places must be specifically supplemented as part of future VD projects. VD16 excluded important printing centres like Amsterdam, Prague and Copenhagen, as they were not being seen as part of German-speaking countries; however, German-language titles printed in these centres were included in the VDs. In the VD17 and VD18, library holdings of the western and southern part of Germany are underrepresented and therefore also printing places lying in these regions. Another distributional bias can be identified by the presence of languages in the bibliographic file: While in the timeframe between 1500 and about 1670 Latin was dominant as the language of the prints, later onwards German dominated. Finally, it has to be noted that the three VD projects are far from being complete, especially the VD18. There are several tens of thousand titles still missing in the VD18, because it is highly unlikely that there should have been fewer prints in the 18th century than in the 17th century.

The two files consist of the three parts of the VD which have been assembled and joined together. However, VD16, VD17, and VD18 are to be understood as separate projects between which recording practices are not consistent, a fact which is reflected in differing uses of classification schemata and authority files. A good example for this incoherence is the indexing of genres of historical prints. In the VD16 project, Gattungsbegriffe (genre terms in old prints) were initially not used. Therefore, such terms are prevalent in the VD17, whereas titles listed in the VD16 have received metadata on genre terms much less often. For a comprehensive estimation of the biases of the three VD’s see Lauer et al. 2024.

Potential Societal Impact of Using the Dataset

This dataset describes historical titles (printed books, monographs, multi-volume works, journals) that have been published between 1501 and 1800. Most probably, the social impact of the dataset is therefore very low.

Examples of Datasets, Publications and Models that (re-)use the Dataset

So far, this dataset has not yet been reused. The dataset contains links to several other datasets which can be retrieved online as complimentary resources. See the section "Data fields" above, especially the explanations on the Pica Production Numbers (PPNs) used in the dataset. There are overlaps with the dataset "Metadata of the ‘Alter Realkatalog’ (ARK) of Berlin State Library (SBB)" published on Zenodo on https://zenodo.org/records/13284442.

Known Non-Ethical Limitations

Another known limitation of the dataset is the fact that journal volumes were only in a few cases catalogued separately; rather, they were added to the respective record. Therefore, the dataset contains hardly any such recordings and does not enable statistical analyses. Users are invited to report further limitations back to the curators.

Unanticipated Uses made of this Dataset

There are no known unanticipated uses made of this dataset. Users are invited to report the uses they made of this dataset back to the curators, which would enable an update of this datasheet.

Datasheet as of April 08, 2025