Rare Languages at the Austrian National Library

Rare Languages at the Austrian National Library Christoph Steindl & Johannes Knüchel Research & Data Services OCR/HTR Workshop for Under-Resourced and Under-Represented Languages in Digital Humanities –CEU, Vienna, Oct. 3–4, 2025 CC BY 4.0 Deed | Namensnennung 4.0 International History ONB and current Austrian Law •Middle Ages: first collections of manuscripts and books •16th c.: first librarian Hugo Blotius takes inventory •Until early 20th c.: connection to the Habsburg Empire as Court Library •Legal deposit since 1569 (updated media law 2009, including digital material) •Collection Guidelines 2024: additionally collecting Austriaca abroad and special collections (history, slavica, women and gender, …) Departments with a focus on rare languages Department of Papyri •More than 23.000 digitized resources (only 10.000 of more than 170.000 edited) •Mostly non-latin scripts (arabic, aramaic, coptic, egyptian, old-ethiopian, ancient greek, hebrew, pahlavi, classical syrian) Department of Planned Languages •Approx. 150.000 items •Documentation for about 500 planned languages Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books Others: ANNO (and ALEX) collections Examples Vājid ʿAlī, Oudh., Briefe., p. 23, https://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AC14391926 Knudtzon, J. A., Assyrische Gebete an den Sonnengott […], p. 22, https://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AC03469409 Untitled, https://data.onb.ac.at/rec/RZ00001149 Volapükabled lezenodik: Juli 1986, https://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/annoplus?aid=e2s&datum=18960057 How to find resources? ONB Digital (digitized materials): https://onb.digital/ ONB Catalogue: https://search.onb.ac.at/ Catalogue Results for query “Handschrift” (manuscript) ONB Digital Results for all resources Statistics 5.2 41.2 53.6 Scripts ONB Digital (3.7 M results) Ambiguous Non-latin Latin 7.1 42.9 50 Scripts Catalogue (approx.) Ambiguous Non-latin Latin Distribution – ONB Digital CDF of issues per language (languages with > 500 issues are combined ) Statistics – ANNO bg - Bulgarian bs - Bosnian ca - Catalan cs - Czech da - Danish de - German el - Greek en - English eo - Esperanto es - Spanish fr - French he - Hebrew hr - Croatian hu - Hungarian ie - Interlingue io - Ido it - Italian ja - Japanese la - Latin lt - Lithuanian nl - Dutch pl - Polish pt - Portuguese ro - Romanian ru - Russian sk - Slovak sl - Slovenian sr - Serbian sv - Swedish uk - Ukrainian vo - Volapük Language codes in ANNO 3.2 19.4 77.4 Scripts ANNO languages Ambiguous Non-latin Latin 0.01 0.28 99.72 Scripts ANNO issues Ambiguous Non-latin Latin How to access resources? ONB Labs Data Sets and Collections Viewer https://viewer.onb.ac.at/13223F68 https://labs.onb.ac.at/en/datasets/ Wenzelsbibel Text in Middle High German Edition already partially published Manual corrections of OCR Encoding via TEI (Transkribus) Synoptic view of both transcribed text & facsimile and of transcribed text & Vulgata text Thank you! Johannes Knüchel ([email protected]) Christoph Steindl ([email protected]) CC BY 4.0 Deed | Namensnennung 4.0 International