Dear Colleagues,

we are so used to gaining access to more sources online that I was
shocked by the news about a major step backwards with respect to online
resources:

The Aufbau volumes (together with all the other titles in the
collections "Exilpresse digital" und "Juedische Periodika aus
NS-Deutschland" that had been accessible online for years - JewishGen
has hundreds (or thousands?) of links to them - have been taken off the
net, they will only be accessible in the reading rooms in Frankfurt and
Leipzig ... (a great help!). They claim that it would be too cumbersome
to check with all the possible disappeared copyright owners and have
taken off ALL the titles, unless there is a change of the German
copyright laws (such a thing takes years in my opinion).

Possibly we should start a campaign for the resurrection at least of the
Aufbau file, claiming need for necessary research etc. "DFG" stands for
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft which seems to have financed the whole
thing, i.e. public money. Because of the change in policy, this money
would have been spent for nothing ...

Or could the USHMM (or some other institution outside the German copyright
law or the German National Library?) host the collections?

I propose to put that on the agenda of the GerSIG meeting in Paris.

Further information (in German) and a link to Frau Dr. Sylvia Asmus >from
the German National Library can be found here

http://www.dnb.de/DE/DEA/Kataloge/Exilpresse/exilpresse_node.html

Fritz Neubauer, Bielefeld fritz.neubauer@uni-bielefeld.de