ANNO AustriaN Newspapers Online

Overview

ANNO (AustriaN Newspapers Online) is the virtual newspaper and magazine reading room of the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, ÖNB). The platform provides free online access to digitized historical Austrian newspapers and periodicals, covering the period from 1568 to 1955, with full-text search available for the majority of that range. It represents one of Europe's largest newspaper digitization projects.

History and Founding

ANNO was launched by the Austrian National Library as a mass-digitization initiative in the early 2000s. The project began digitizing particularly important and widely used historical newspapers, scanning them and making them freely available via the internet. The initiative has been continuously expanded over subsequent years, with cooperation from the Library of the Austrian Parliament, various university libraries, and municipal libraries throughout Austria. Since its founding, the platform has grown to encompass over 1,100 different titles.

Collections and Holdings

ANNO currently holds more than 20 million pages of historical newspapers and magazines spanning from 1568 to 1955. Significant titles include the Wiener Zeitung (from 1703), the Arbeiter Zeitung, the Pester Lloyd, the Prager Tagblatt, the Reichspost, the Neue Freie Presse, and Die Presse. Over 90 percent of the digital collection is searchable by full text. Materials are available in German, Italian, Czech, and Hungarian, among other languages.

Notable Materials for Journalism and Media Research

ANNO is an invaluable resource for the history of print journalism in the Habsburg Empire and the Austrian Republic. The archive preserves the full run of landmark newspapers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, making it possible to study the development of the German-language press, political journalism, and media history across Central Europe.

Access and Usage

All materials on ANNO are freely accessible online at anno.onb.ac.at. Users can browse by title, date, or topic; download individual pages as PDFs; and order high-quality scans for commercial use. ANNO datasets with metadata are also available for download via ÖNB Labs. The Austrian National Library invites cooperation from institutions seeking to expand the platform's holdings.