The German Newspaper Portal brings together digitised newspaper collections from various cultural heritage institutions. Our partners are responsible for digitising the newspapers, i.e. scanning and capturing the full texts. Different software and standards are used in the process. The resulting scans and full texts are transferred to the German Newspaper Portal without any changes, so that the newspaper portal contains full texts of varying quality.

The time of origin of the full texts can also play a role: There have been major technical improvements in recent years, meaning that full texts created during more recent digitisation projects are often of significantly better quality than older full texts.

When searching in the newspaper portal, lemmatisation is used for nouns and proper names. Lemmatisation is the reduction of a word to its basic form, the so-called lemma. For the search in the newspaper portal, this means that a search for "Schillers" will also find "Schiller". So it doesn't matter whether you enter "Schiller" or "Schillers" in the search slot, you will get the same results in both cases. Currently, lemmatisation is also used in the phrase search, i.e. it does not matter whether you search for "Schiller National Museum" or "Schillers National Museum". You can find out more about lemmatisation at Wikipedia, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemma_(morphology).

To display the complete contents of the German Newspaper Portal, enter the asterisk * in the search slot and press Enter. Alternatively, you can leave the search slot empty and press Enter.

The search results are displayed in random order. You can scroll through the search results and narrow them down using the filters.

The central search slot on the homepage or in the header allows you to search for newspapers with a specific publication date or publication year. Search queries must be in the form DD.MM.YYYY or YYYY. You can also combine the date search with ‘normal’ search terms. For example, a search for "Berliner Tageblatt 04.01.1910" will return the corresponding newspaper edition as the first hit. A search for "Bismarck 1890" returns all issues from 1890 in which Bismarck was mentioned.

Wildcard search 

In the full-text search, you can use the question mark ? and asterisk * wildcards for certain characters in search terms. The question mark stands for a single character. The asterisk stands for any number of characters. Letters and numbers count as characters.

You typically use wildcards if a term has several spellings or can also occur as part of a word.

Enter Schmi* to find the names Schmidt and Schmitt.

If you enter Schiller*museum, you will find Schiller Museum, Schiller National Museum, Schiller Museum, etc.

Enter Me?er to find the names Meyer and Meier.

Wildcards can be placed at the end or anywhere within the search term.

Note: Wildcards cannot be placed at the beginning of a word.

 

Boolean operators

Searching with Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) is currently not possible.

Phrase search

A phrase search allows you to search for words in close proximity by combining individual words into a phrase using inverted commas.

While a search for Schillermuseum Weimar, for example, returns all those issues in which the words Schillermuseum and Weimar appear in any position (e.g. ... the Schillermuseum in Weimar ... City of Weimar and the Schillermuseum ...), a phrase search for "Schillermuseum Weimar" restricts the result to outputs in which the words Schillermuseum and Weimar occur in exact succession.

A combination of phrase search and wildcard search is supported; a search for "Schillermuseum Weimar" Goethe? will return hits containing both the phrase and the term searched for using wildcards. The use of wildcards within a phrase search is not supported.

A phrase search is only possible with at least two terms. It is currently not possible to narrow down the search to just one search term, e.g. "Schillers".

 

Distance search

Another way of limiting the sometimes very high number of hits is the distance search. You can specify the maximum number of words that may be between two search words in the form "Search term search term"~number of words.

By entering "Schillermuseum Weimar"~17, there must be no more than 17 words between the words "Schillermuseum" and "Weimar" (but there may be less than 17). The order in which "Schillermuseum" and "Weimar" occur is not taken into account, so occurrences of "Weimar"... "Schillermuseum" are also found. The minimum distance that can be searched for is one word.

In the German Newspaper Portal you can search in and for historical newspapers.

Search in historical newspapers

Approximately 90% of all issues in the German Newspaper Portal have full texts. The full texts can be searched via the search slot on the homepage or in the header. You can also search individual newspapers or individual issues of a newspaper using the full text search.

Search for historical newspapers

Using the boxes ‘Select newspaper by title’, ‘Select newspaper by place’, ‘Select newspaper by year of publication’ on the main page, you can find all newspapers available in the German Newspaper Portal by their title, their place of distribution or their publication date.

The German Newspaper Portal is a ‘subportal’ of the German Digital Library (DDB), which only contains newspapers and offers genre-specific searches and object displays. All newspapers can also be found in the German Digital Library. But only in the newspaper portal can you search in newspapers (so-called full-text search); it is only here that you can browse entry points according to the title, place and date of a newspaper and only here are full texts accessible, if our data partners have made these available.

There may be various reasons for this. For example, the majority of historical newspapers have not yet been digitised. Digitisation is the responsibility of our partners, the cultural heritage institutions, and it is a complex and resource-intensive process. Some digitised newspapers cannot be displayed in the German Newspaper Portal for legal reasons, others do not meet the minimum technical standards. It is also possible that the newspaper belongs to the holdings of an institution that is not yet involved in the German Newspaper Portal.

The objective of the German Newspaper Portal is to bring together all the holdings of digitised historical newspapers in German cultural heritage institutions - mostly libraries and archives - in one portal and make them searchable. This is a process that will take many years. Our partners are continuously making digitised newspapers available so that the content in the German Newspaper Portal is constantly growing.