ERAM - Digitisation of Classical Mathematical Publications

Longevity is typical for research achievements in mathematics. Hence to improve the availability of the classical publications in that area and to enable to get quick information on these, electronic literature information services and digital archives of the complete texts will be needed as important tools for the mathematical research in the future. This will bring the holdings from the journals archives nearer to the user and will prevent lost of the papers because of the deterioration of the paper as a consequence of age. The aim of this article is to give a more detailed report of a project, the so-called ERAM project, capturing the "Jahrbuch" as a classical bibliographic service in mathematics in a database and using this activity to select important publications from the Jahrbuch period for digitisation and storage in a digital archive. The database will not be just a copy of the printed bibliography. It will contain a lot of enhancements like modern subject classifications as far as possible, keywords giving ideas about the content in modern terms and comments relating classical results to modern mathematical research areas. These features will remain open for additions within a living project. The digital archive built up in connection with the database will be linked to the database and provide all facilities associated with current digitisation projects. The content will be distributed to mirrors and combined with similar archiving activities in mathematics.