Franconian Bibliography: Content
The Franconian Bibliography (Fränkische Bibliographie) is one of the older regional bibliographies and contains literature about Franconia and its geographical and historical border regions.
To ensure your search is successful, please note the following.
Territory
As a regional bibliography, the Franconian Bibliography contains literature about the Franconian administrative districts of Middle Franconia, Upper Franconia and Lower Franconia as well as the Franconian Circle. Titles from neighbouring regions are also indexed where historically relevant.
People
People are considered relevant who were born in the region and/or lived and worked and/or died in the region.
Period covered
The database encompasses all publications on Franconia since its beginning up to the reporting year 1945.
Scope
The database contains 55,245 titles.
Nothing is added to the Franconian Bibliography; instead, the Bavarian Bibliography (Bayerische Bibliographie) is continuously updated.
Literature evaluated
Please note that the bibliography does not contain any literature on Albrecht Dürer.
It lists monographs, articles from anthologies and journals, newspaper articles, handbooks and lexicons. Supplements from local newspapers, which were particularly numerous in the first half of the 20th century, are also evaluated.
Indexing
There is no subject indexing for the titles in the Franconian Bibliography database; you cannot search for them by classification or using subject headings. However, you can use the free text search to look for terms (keywords).
History
The database replaces the previous Franconian Bibliography, which was only available in print.
The printed bibliography (often cited as ‘Pfeiffer’) was a project of the Society for Franconian History (Gesellschaft für Fränkische Geschichte):
Gerhard Pfeiffer et al. (eds), Franconian Bibliography. Literature index for historic Franconian regional studies. 4 volumes (published by the Society for Franconian History. XI. Bibliographies and materials on Franconian history, 3,1–4), Würzburg/Neustadt a. d. Aisch 1965–1978.
The Franconian Bibliography project began in 1905 and was based on existing collections from the large Franconian libraries in Ansbach, Aschaffenburg, Bamberg, Bayreuth, Coburg, Eichstätt, Erlangen, Nuremberg and Würzburg, with specialists brought in for smaller locations. The first volume was not published until 60 years later, having been interrupted by two world wars, persistent discussions on content, and staffing and financial problems.
The Würzburg University Library scanned the printed bibliography with the permission of the Society for Franconian History and used OCR to transform the digital files into a database. An initial version of the database was made available online as part of the "Franconica Online" portal.
Over the following years, the Franconian Regional Studies department of Würzburg University Library made extensive revisions to the second database version: the often inconsistent abbreviations for names and periodical titles were resolved where possible, obvious errors were corrected (e.g. when converting handwritten documents to set text) and numerous ambiguities in monograph titles were verified using the current library catalogues. Given its scope, the database may contain further errors – should you identify an error, please let us know. The current database uses the search engine technology SolR.
More helpful information can be found in the search tips.
