Policy

Gutenberg Capture Guidelines

  1. Gutenberg Capture is designed to make digital collections available and is a service offered by the University Library to the academic community.
  2. Gutenberg Capture follows the quality standards recognized in the scientific community, ensuring the long-term and sustainable usability of research sources.
  3. Gutenberg Capture is an interoperable building block in the network of national and international information infrastructures for science.
  4. Gutenberg Capture is committed to the principles of open science, as also represented by Johannes Gutenberg University and the relevant scientific organizations.

The service

Gutenberg Capture is the University Library's portal for digitizing, indexing, and making available the Library's own digitized collections. In addition, we also offer other institutions within and outside Johannes Gutenberg University project-based collaboration in providing digitized research sources, for example for use in third-party funded projects. The costs incurred in this context are to be covered within the framework of the project-related requirements and financing concept.

On request, we also make individual works from our holdings available on Gutenberg Capture. We avoid duplicate digitizations if long-term digitized material is already available elsewhere that meets the quality standards listed below.

Our quality standards

The technical basis for Gutenberg Capture is the widely used presentation and indexing platform Visual Library. The system is a user-friendly and, due to its high degree of dissemination, sustainable solution for providing textual and audiovisual materials. Gutenberg Capture follows the quality standards recognized in the scientific community, such as those set out in the "DFG Praxisregeln Digitalsierung" (PDF file/German). This concerns:

  • the technical parameters for digitization
  • the assignment of descriptive and structural metadata
  • the use of the Integrated Authority File (GND)
  • text indexing by OCR

With this and by assigning permanent identifiers as well as regular data backups at the JGU Data Center, we ensure that our data are usable in the long term and recognized in the context of funded research projects.

Interoperability and interconnectivity of digital collections

Gutenberg Capture serves the long-term preservation and provision of historical research sources within the framework of a networked national and international information infrastructure. To ensure our interoperability, we make our collections available through standards-compliant interfaces (OAI in conjunction with division-specific, XML-based metadata standards) and transmit the data to national institutions that provide long-term preservation. Furthermore, we see Gutenberg Capture as a tool in the context of a broader research process. Together with scientists, we develop solutions to transfer the data to digital reasearch environments, such as, for example, FuD. For such projects, we offer project-based collaboration.

Terms of use for our data

Mainz University Library is committed to the guiding principle of open and transparent science and therefore provides unrestricted and free access to Gutenberg Capture. Our metadata can generally be used freely. Taking into account legitimate legal and scholarly interests, we always release digitized materials for unrestricted and free use at the earliest possible time, guided by the following principles:

  • Public domain works are released immediately after completion of editing; embargo periods for public domain works made available as part of scientific projects are possible and are determined and agreed upon at the beginning of the project. Digitized copies of public domain works are made available on Gutenberg Capture under Public Domain Mark.
  • For non-free works and materials, a rights clearance with regard to copyrights, personal rights or ancillary copyrights and a determination of the terms of use based on a Creative Commons license must have been made at the latest when digitization begins. In order to make legally protected works or materials available on Gutenberg Capture, it is necessary for the rights holder to transfer a perpetual right of use (Deposit License) to the University Library..

  • Gutenberg Capture is not used for works and their metadata whose embargo period exceeds a period of 5 years.