Innovating access to ETH-Library's Thomas Mann Archive: A project report

Not only is ETH Zurich one of the world's leading technical universities, with its major collections and archives it also makes key contributions towards the preservation and mediation of national and international cultural assets. The Thomas Mann Archive at ETH-Library is one of these archives. It houses the majority of the written personal papers of the famous German author and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Thomas Mann. Under the ambitious project TMA_Online, the roughly 35,000 manuscripts and letters and more than 80,000 newspaper articles from the Thomas Mann Archive were described and digitised fully in less than two years. The new web service Thomas Mann Archive Online is now available for searches. This project report outlines the concrete procedure in the various sub-projects, the challenges involved and the results achieved.