Digitisation and Indexing Funding Programme
Funds German research institutions to digitise and index collections using advanced and innovative methods, ensuring open access and long-term preservation for research purposes.
Funder: German Research Foundation
Due Dates: Rolling submission (proposals accepted at any time)
Funding Amounts: No minimum or maximum; funding based on project needs; applicant must cover at least one third of project-specific costs.
Summary: Supports digitisation and indexing projects at German research infrastructure institutions to enhance open access, interoperability, and research use of collections.
Key Information: Proposals must be submitted via the DFG’s elan portal; project results must be open access and preserved long-term.
Description
This programme funds digitisation and indexing projects at German research infrastructure institutions—including libraries, archives, museums, research collections, research data centres, and computing/information centres. The aim is to improve access to, and interoperability of, research-relevant objects such as manuscripts, printed documents, museum objects, audio-visual media, born-digital data, and image datasets. The programme encourages both established and innovative methods (e.g., OCR, OLR, 3D digitisation, named-entity recognition), supports the development of standards or quality criteria where none exist, and enables cross-disciplinary virtual mergers of collections. All projects must ensure open access and long-term preservation of results, and must be clearly distinct from the institution’s core mission (i.e., not for cultural preservation or education alone).
