Innsbruck Newspaper Archive on German and foreign language literature

The Innsbruck Newspaper Archive on German and Foreign Language Literature (IZA) at the Department of German Studies is the largest university documentation centre for journalistic literary criticism and media literature promotion in the German-speaking world. The main focus of the collection is on press articles on literature and related fields ranging from theatre and cabaret to books and philology, from literary film adaptations to the work of singer-songwriters. All times, cultures and languages are taken into account, as far as they are considered in the discourse of German-language literary criticism. To this end, over 40 German-language daily newspapers, weekly newspapers and magazines are currently being analysed.

The IZA has evolved from the collection of newspaper clippings, initially privately maintained since 1960 by Prof. Dr. Michael Klein (1939-2020), which was institutionalized at the University of Innsbruck in 1988, and today documents well over one million press articles. Until 30 September 2000, the collection was kept as a paper archive, which was retro-digitized and transferred to a database in 2005. This database can be accessed by approximately 70,000 personal names and subject headings on literary life, while the paper archive itself is still physically stored as an archive collection. Since October 1, 2000, the archiving of the continuously analysed newspaper clippings has only been carried out electronically; this inventory now comprises well over half a million newspaper articles and is growing by several tens of thousands each year. The individual sections of the collection are formally recorded bibliographically and their contents are indexed using a differentiated thesaurus. The metadata ensure bibliographical precision and high research quality. 

The newspaper clippings collection of the IZA is supplemented by a small library collection of selected literary and cultural periodicals as well as a collection of recordings of literary radio and television broadcasts, which has now been closed. The most recent part of the collection is a web archive for digital literary magazines and blogs (DILIMAG) as well as for authors' homepages, which are documented in selected examples and archived on a long-term basis.

All of the IZA's databases can be accessed via the archive's homepage for online research, and a user room is available for on-site research. Paper copies of all articles from the press documentation can be ordered. For copyright reasons it is not possible to pass on copies in digital form.