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A Survey of the Digitisation of German Newspapers in interwar Lithuania (1918–1940)

Paper · 2026 · Lina Plaušinaitytė and Heike Zinsmeister

Summary

German-language periodicals from interwar Lithuania (1918–1940) are a multilingual, minority-press resource that historians and linguists have barely used. Under the European Minority Protection Regime, minorities in the young republic could publish in their own languages, yet none of these papers appear in major newspaper platforms such as DZP, ANNO, DTA, DiFMOE, Impresso or PressMint. The authors map what survives and what is digitised, focusing on titles distributed in Kaunas, the interim capital. They draw on specialised bibliographies, the ZDB serials database, Lithuanian and German library holdings, and Library of Congress records. Existing digitisation proves small and limited to page images. The paper also discusses OCR difficulties, including Fraktur, complex multi-column layouts, creative advertisement typography and code-switching with local languages. It outlines a planned digital resource: facsimiles aligned with OCR text and segmented articles, plus a lemma- and POS-annotated linguistic corpus. This groundwork is a first step toward bringing an under-documented diaspora press into interoperable newspaper corpora.

Key points

  • Disagreeing source counts:
    • Weber's (2013a) bibliography lists 55 German-language newspapers and journals for Lithuania in 1918–1940: 3 in Kaunas, 9 in Vilnius and 41 in the Klaipėda region.
    • The ZDB gives different counts: 6 in Kaunas, 14 in Vilnius and 29 in Klaipėda.
  • Largest print holding: The Martynas Mažvydas National Library (LNB) holds 1,167 printed issues of Litauische Rundschau, plus roughly 440 duplicates. The ZDB does not record these.
  • Existing image-only digitisations:
    • The Vrublevski Library offers facsimiles of only 8 Litauische Rundschau issues.
    • Vilnius University's online collection devoted to the 1918–1940 newspapers of Lithuania's German minority provides 24 + 127 issues of Litauische Rundschau and 151 issues of Deutsche Nachrichten für Litauen.
  • Planned presentation layer: The DFG Viewer, using METS/MODS and METS/TEI representations, would link OCR text with the page facsimiles.
  • Planned corpus tooling: SpaCy is envisaged for annotation, with ANNIS or DATS for search.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Universität HamburgHamburg · Germany79 works · 5,422 citations🎓Vilnius UniversityVilnius · Lithuania2 works · 1 citation

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 5The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksInformation Systems · 1,437 worksLiterature and Literary Theory · 519 worksConservation · 7 works

Cite

Cite as Lina Plaušinaitytė and Heike Zinsmeister. 2026. A Survey of the Digitisation of German Newspapers in interwar Lithuania (1918–1940). Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2tcpjmdfqgis

@inproceedings{plausinaityte2026survey,
  title = {{A Survey of the Digitisation of German Newspapers in interwar Lithuania (1918–1940)}},
  author = {Lina Plaušinaitytė and Heike Zinsmeister},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Creating Interoperable Corpora of Historical Newspapers},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/2tcpjmdfqgis},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2tcpjmdfqgis}
}

References

3 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. shows three example page sections of Litauische Rundschau from 1920 that exhibit challenging characteristics for OCR. Whiles these pages are printed in Antiqua script, issues from this newspaper published between 1924 and 1929 present the addition challenge of being printed in Fraktur script (not shown here). 5. find
  2. Raphaël Barman, Maud Ehrmann, Simon Clematide, Sofia Ares Oliveira, and Frédéric Kaplan. 2021. Combining visual and textual features for semantic segmentation of historical newspapers. Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities, (HistoInformatics). ↗
  3. Conclusion and future work Jens Bjerring-Hansen, Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, Philip Diderichsen, and Dorte Haltrup Hansen. 2022. Mending fractured texts. A heuristic procedure for correcting OCR data. In Proceedings of the 6th Digital Humanities in the Nordic and Baltic Countries Conference, DHNB 2022, volume 3232 of CEURS Workshop proceedings, pages 177–186. find

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