20th Century Press Archives

Jahrhundert) comprises about 19 million newspaper clippings, organized in folders about persons, companies, wares, events and topics.

In Hamburg, after a few years, the "Zentralstelle" (central office) of the Kolonialinstitut was transformed from a free information center for colonial issues into a comprehensive archive of global political and economic topics, which primarily supported the city's merchants.

[2] The staff of HWWA reflected its importance and grew from 54 in 1919 to 183 permanent or temporary employees in 1958 – a number that seems to have remained largely stable until the late 1990s.

[5] During the first and second world wars, both archives were intensively involved in the foreign and wartime planning of the empire and the Nazi state.

[8] Following a recommendation from an evaluation within the Leibniz Association in 2003, the current press documentation was finished at the end of 2005 and the materials were frozen at that point.

[9] The separate existence of the HWWA ended in 2007 with the integration of its press documentation and library into the ZBW as a newly formed foundation under public law.

From 2004 to 2007, the German Research Foundation funded a project to digitize parts of the archives, namely the materials from the beginning up to 1949 (the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany).

Optical character recognition could not be applied due to the partially used Fraktur scripts, the constantly changing fonts (as well as languages) in the sequence of the articles, and the sometimes poor quality of the clippings.

Numerous individual articles within the dossiers are subject to blocking notices if the death of the author (or in the case of anonymous or pseudonymous works, the date of publication) is less than 70 years ago.

In 2019, the German National Library of Economics (ZBW) placed all the metadata of the archives under a CC0 licence, and began a cooperation and "data donation" with Wikimedia Deutschland.

[38] In 2024, changes to intellectual property rights in Europe made it possible to provide complete digitized images from the archive – some 3.8 million pages – for online viewing within the European Union.