Turkology Annual
The most important systematic bibliography for Turkology and Ottoman Studies is the Turkologische Anzeiger/Turkology Annual (TA), founded by Andreas Tietze (†) and György Hazai (†). Experts from all over the world are involved in its compilation. The volumes published by the Institute for Oriental Studies at the University of Vienna were previously only available in printed form.
Turkology Annual Online
As part of a project at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University, the first 26 TA volumes were digitised and all entries made available in an online database with search options. At the FID, a new database with corresponding functionalities was set up in 2023, analogous to the original project, and the previous content was made visible and searchable. The entries for the missing volumes 27-30, which were published after 2010, will be added in a timely manner according to the existing category scheme.
Since the volumes of the TA contained entries in many different languages, including transcriptions from Arabic and languages with the Cyrillic alphabet, full text recognition (OCR) posed great challenges to the original project. Individual entries sometimes consist of sections in different languages. However, the results proved to be very satisfactory in most cases (also as a result of subsequent fine-tuning). The syntax analysis (parsing) of the TA entries posed a bigger problem, as the different entry types and their data structures are often only implicitly marked and some of them change from volume to volume.