Post-war history at a glance: retrospective digitisation of social­democratic press services Presentation, given at the XXXIV IALHI Conference in Dublin, September 2003 In the recent past nearly all industrial nations have developed programs that aim at making their cultural heritage available as digital publications on the Internet and thus allow access for everyone. Different nations have found different ways of presenting their cultural heritage digitally. The United States as well as France chose solutions that allocated a leading role to their national libraries(the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). An example for a project with centralised administration“from the top” is the French project“Gallica”(http://gallica.bnf.fr). After the Second World War German cultural policy was organised in an extremely federalist and decentralised way. Librarianship is normally the responsibility of the German Länder. However, there are national authorities in Germany that have an all­German function in the field of librarianship. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (the central public funding organisation for academic research in Germany) belongs to these institutions. It fosters national projects in German librarianship (http://www.dfg.de). Since 1995 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft finances a big project that deals with the development of virtual specialised libraries. This ambitious project is very challenging for all participating libraries. Within this project financial support is available for single digitising measures. German libraries can apply for this financial support. Independent experts decide on the projects. Naturally, the allocation of financial support is committed to certain conditions: The documents must be of special significance for academic research. They must be rare. The online presentation should lead to a certain added value. All questions concerning copyright law must be verified. Within the Library of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation we thought quite a long time about the question which documents we could recommend for the national project of retrospective digitisation. The chance to be financially supported attracted us, of course. After thorough consideration we decided on the Social-Democratic Press Service in the years 1946 to 1995(http://library.fes.de/cgi-bin/populo/spdpd.pl). Every expert among us knows that newspapers are an important source for the