Digital Material

Literature on Word Research (Literatur zur Wortforschung):

The Online Database for Literature on Word Research allows users to search for scholarly literature focused on individual words. This database, developed by the Göttingen office in collaboration with the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB), originated as part of the project German Dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (new edition). The Literature on Word Research card index is available as an online database that enables users to locate academic literature related to specific words. The data is based on a traditional card catalog that contained references to scholarly publications on entries from A to Z. Originally used as an internal reference tool for the dictionary project, it has since been digitised. 

The database contains around 14,000 entries and offers extensive bibliographic details for the field of individual word research. These records are directly linked via internal library identification numbers to the holdings of the Common Library Network (GVK), allowing users to place online requests for the referenced literature. This creates a convenient path from bibliographic information directly to the corresponding book in a nearby library. The implementation of the online version would not have been possible, either in terms of capacity or technical expertise, without the support of the SUB. We are therefore very grateful for this fruitful collaboration. Special thanks go to Antje Niemann, Ursula Stolarsky, and Ruth Welzel for their expert guidance, and to Michael Rzehak and Birgit Wiegandt for technical development and design.

Digitisation of the Göttingen Source Index for Volumes D–F:

Through the digitised Göttingen Source Index, users can access bibliographic information on the sources cited in the ²DWB (Second Edition of the German Dictionary). This digital index, covering volumes D–F produced by the Göttingen office, was developed in collaboration with the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB). The project’s goal was to link the Göttingen sources to the university library system, enabling users to go directly from a citation in the dictionary to the corresponding book in a library within the network.

In both the revised edition and the original ¹DWB, bibliographic references are traditionally presented in abbreviated form directly following the text citation. For instance, if a reader wants to know the full title of a source like “mönch v. Salzburg 27,17 M./R.”, they first have to decode the abbreviation. This can be challenging, as the citation system used in the ²DWB is not self-explanatory and is not documented within the printed volumes. With the appropriate background knowledge, the example above can be interpreted as follows:

1. Small caps indicate the author’s name - in this case, “Mönch von Salzburg.”
2. The numbers “27,17” refer to a specific passage: piece/stanza or section 27, line 17.
3. “M./R.” denotes the editors F. Arnold Mayer and Heinrich Rietsch.

Further details about this source are available only through the internal Göttingen citation list, which contains all bibliographic abbreviations, date information, and source numbers. Each source is assigned a unique number, which links the abbreviated citation to its corresponding full title in the source database. This system allows users to identify both the short and full citation and relate them to one another:

• Source no.: 3347.1
• Date: (Early 14th century)
• Full title: Mönch von Salzburg: Mönch von Salzburg, Die Mondsee-Wiener Liederhandschrift und der Mönch von Salzburg, edited by F. Arnold Mayer and Heinrich Rietsch, 2 volumes, Acta Germanica 3, 4, Berlin 1896.
• Call number: 8° Ling. VI 325: 3, 4

Without these details, users of the ²DWB would have no access to the full titles of cited sources. Since a complete source index for volumes A–F can only be compiled once the entire project is finished, the most relevant information is being made available online ahead of time. This also represents an important preparatory step toward the final index, which will be compiled jointly with the Berlin office. The digitisation of the Göttingen source collection was made possible with support from the Göttingen State and University Library (SUB). The following work steps were involved: First, the source numbers were used to link the abbreviated citations to the corresponding full bibliographic records. Next, those records were assigned appropriate call numbers, allowing users to locate the full title in a library. Each title had to be matched with a so-called PPN (a library-internal identifier used to locate all holdings of a work within the union catalog). Since this step required philological expertise and was prone to error, it could not be automated; instead, two student assistants manually checked each title, identified it in the internal SUB database, and assigned the correct PPN.

Following this preparatory work, an HTML-based user interface was developed. For the ²DWB volumes D–F, you can now access a full title by selecting the “[ZIT] Citation Title” option in the database’s search interface and entering the desired reference, e.g. “MÖNCH V. SALZBURG.” The search result will show a title reference as a number (e.g., “Title in GVK: 136706134”). Clicking on this number will open a new tab displaying the full bibliographic entry and a list of libraries that hold the item. All listed sources can be ordered directly through the library union catalogue system. As an extension of the original concept, several hundred electronic reference entries have been added to the database until 2016. For these entries, a digitised version (sourced from verified library holdings or Google Books) is available for direct online viewing. These links are shown in the search results.

Word Archive:

The Word Archive contains the complete keyword lists for the background material related to volumes D, E, and F. The approximately 2.4 million citations in the Göttingen ²DWB archive (for the letters D, E, and F) include many entries that, for example, were not included in the dictionary due to limited attestation. (In Volume 8, for instance, only about 12% of the words documented in the archive were actually incorporated into the dictionary, see ²DWB 8,5*f.) However, since the words not included still represent a significant portion of the German dictionary, we provide here the full word archive lists for the letters D, E, and F. These lists show which words are present in the ²DWB citation archive and indicate the time period from which the attestations originate. Due to the lists being compiled and processed at different times and based on slightly varying criteria, the formatting of the entries may differ. For example, the period of attestation may be given as exact years for first and last citations in some cases, and as half a century in others.