Bomber's Baedeker: From image to text

The two-volume publication "The Bomber's Baedeker. A Guide to the Economic Importance of German Towns and Cities" was produced by the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Economic Warfare during the Second World War. It lists towns and cities of the German Reich with more than a thousand inhabitants and information on their war-related infrastructure, industrial and production facilities. Only four copies are known to exist worldwide, one of them in the IEG. But none of them has been digitally accessible, for example, for scientific use. In the Annual Report 2020, it was reported that the IEG copy of the "Bomber's Baedeker" (2nd edition, 1944) was transformed from a digitised printed book (image) to a machine-readable text (XML) in a three-stage process in a cross-institutional cooperation between the Digital Historical Research | DH Lab department and the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences after it had been digitised and photo-documented by Mainz University Library (2019).
In 2021, the main focus was on the final editing of content and form (text and XML) and the preparation of the encoding according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). This text edition represents an important step in the data preparation and enables further scenarios of, for example, scientific re-use of this rare source.