Don Juan Archiv Wien Mauerbach Collection: 4,500 Theatre Texts and Libretti, 1750-1930

A collection of structured bibliographic metadata for approximately 4,500 theatre texts and libretti from the Mauerbach complex. The physical collection consists of about 2,975 volumes printed from the mid-18th century to around 1930, primarily in German-speaking regions like Vienna, Berlin, and Leipzig. The dataset was created by the Don Juan Archiv Wien for digital library and search systems, with research into the collection's history published in 2024.

Use Cases

• Conducting bibliographic analysis based on metadata for authors, titles, and publication years.
• Researching the history of theatre collections and their provenance based on documented collection context.
• Training named entity recognition models on structured metadata for authors and publication places.
• Mapping the geographic and temporal distribution of German-language theatre texts based on publication locations and dates.

Strengths

• Metadata covers approximately 4,500 distinct theatre texts and libretti.
• Collection has a defined temporal scope from the mid-18th century to around 1930.
• Data is structured in a semantic web format (XML/RDF using the Europeana Data Model) for interoperability.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic and linguistic bias inherent to its source, focusing on German-language prints from Central Europe.

Provenance

Source

Don Juan Archiv Wien

Collection Method

Inventoried and digitized from the physical Mauerbach collection acquired in 1996.

Time Range

mid-18th century to around 1930

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-10 07:10:10; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Primarily German-speaking regions (e.g., Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig)