Bomber’s Baedeker: From image to text

The two-volume printed work “The Bomber’s Baedeker. A Guide to the Economic Importance of German Towns and Cities” was produced by the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Economic Warfare during the Second World War. It lists cities in the German Empire with more than a thousand inhabitants and information about their infrastructure, industrial and production facilities that are important to the war effort. There are only four recorded specimens left worldwide, one of which is in the IEG. None of these have so far been, among other things, digitally accessible for scientific use.
In 2019, the IEG copy of “Bomber’s Baedeker” (2nd edition, 1944) was digitized at the Mainz University Library.
In 2020, the digital copy was created in a cross-institutional cooperation by the Department of Digital Historical Research | DH Lab and the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences transformed it from the digitized print work (image) to machine-readable text (XML) in a three-stage process.
In 2021, the main focus was on the final content and formal editing (text and XML) and the preparation of the coding according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This text edition represents an important step in data preparation and enables further scenarios, including the scientific reuse of this rare source.