Student flyers offer a special view of the past. A project by the University Archive now aims to make these previously unused sources digitally accessible.
Anyone who regularly goes to the canteen will be familiar with the picture: colourful leaflets, flyers and self-printed flyers are piled up on the tables and the notice boards are covered with posters. The printed material invites people to parties, provides information about readings or calls for protest actions. "Leaflets are a kind of seismograph for what's happening at the university," says Dr Gunnar Zimmermann, Head of the University Archive. Today, the socio-cultural and political life of students is largely organised digitally, but until the 2000s, leaflets were the most important means for organisations such as student bodies, AStA, political student associations, advice centres or clubs to spread their messages. A goldmine for historians like Zimmermann: "The student writings have enormous source value," he explains, "they reveal university history beyond administration and academia and show how students reacted to social changes."
However, historical research into this special form of cultural heritage has hardly been possible to date - for example, because the leaflets are very short-lived and the student organisations from which they originate do not usually keep their products. Although there are some extensive collections in German University Archives, only a few of the contents have been digitised. A particular sticking point: in most cases, the copyrights have not been clarified. This is also a problem with anonymous writings: "If no author can be identified, the term of protection ends 70 years after publication," explains Zimmermann. Works from the second half of the 20th century are therefore still taboo at present.
The historian now wants to tackle this issue: Together with colleagues from the University Archives in Hamburg, a team from the University Archives in Oldenburg is involved in a project that aims to make flyers and other student "pamphlets" accessible for research. The project "Rights-protected small writings in archives" is being funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) over two years within the pilot phase of the "Digitisation and Indexing" funding programme with a total of around 240,000 euros. The University of Oldenburg will receive around 50,000 euros of this.
Making copyright-protected objects available digitally
"There is a great demand from research, museums and other cultural heritage institutions to digitise objects from the 20th century that are still protected by copyright," reports Zimmermann. The aim of the project is to develop a workflow to overcome the legal hurdles. A fully qualified lawyer from Hamburg is part of the team to deal with the legal intricacies. The researchers want to find out whether the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), based in Alicante, Spain, offers a way to publish sources despite copyright protection. "You can use an online portal to post objects there whose authors are unknown or cannot be identified. If no one comes forward within six months, the objects can be re-utilised, for example published digitally, without having to fear legal consequences," explains Zimmermann.
On the Oldenburg side, the University Archive's collection of flyers will serve as a test object. The University of Oldenburg has an extensive collection from the years 1974 to 1998. 86 volumes with around 9,000 numbers - individual flyers, but also student magazines and brochures - have been collected over the years by the former library director Herrmann Havekost and his team. As part of the project, these finds are now to be professionally catalogued, digitised and entered into the EUIPO portal. "We want to find out whether this is a practicable approach," says Zimmermann.
His dream is that one day a Germany-wide portal for leaflets will be created in which student printed material can be accessed digitally. "This would make it possible to ask completely new research questions, for example about the major peace demonstrations in Bonn in the early 1980s, which were very much organised by student associations," says the historian. The leaflets could also broaden our view of the history of the anti-nuclear and environmental movements. For Zimmermann, one thing is clear: "In order to get a complete picture of university life, it is crucial to also record the voices and perspectives of the students."
