Under the auspices of the project funded by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur (Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture, MWK) more than 13,000 maps will be catalogued in depth, digitised and made accessible in virtual form.

The HAB owns more than 4,500 loose map sheets from the 16th to the 19th centuries, including precious and rare maps, such as the portolan charts drawn on parchment and 16th-century printed wall maps. One example is Christoph Pyramius’s map of the Holy Roman Empire from 1547. Around 950 of the maps chart the territories of the old German Empire, around half of which relate to the region of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the adjoining territories. Italy is represented by 98 maps and France by 82. Other remarkable items are the 49 maps of Russia and Siberia and the 23 maps of Poland and the Baltic. The holdings, which were previously catalogued in a card index, will gradually be entered into the Old Maps Database IKAR. Currently, some 2,000 sheet maps from the collection are listed there; some of the holdings are also catalogued in depth in the Virtuelles Kupferstichkabinett (Virtual Print Room).

The cooperative project aims to catalogue in depth and digitise around 3,000 maps from the 16th to 19th centuries held by the HAB. The focus will be on unique items and on a broad spectrum of maps with regional links to the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg and the territory of Lower Saxony. The undertaking is a first component of the project to create a joint Verteilte Digitale Landesbibliothek (Distributed Digital State Library, VDL) of Lower Saxony’s three state libraries.

In cooperation with the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek Hannover (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Library, Hanover) and the Landesbibliothek Oldenburg (State Library, Oldenburg)

PURL: http://diglib.hab.de/?link=103

Funding: MWK
Duration: July 2019 – June 2021
Project participants: Dr Hartmut Beyer (contact), Dr Christian Heitzmann (contact), Andrea Opitz (contact), Christoph Boveland (team member), Holger Bühring (team member)