Nordisk familjebok
Nordisk familjebok (en. Nordic familybook) is a
Swedish encyclopedia, published between
1876 and 1957.
The first edition was published in 20 volumes between 1876 and 1899. The first edition is known as the
Idun edition because of the picture of Idun on the cover. The second edition was published between 1904 and 1926 in 38 volumes, and is thereby the most comprehensive encyclopedia published in the Swedish language. It is popularly known as
Uggleupplagan ("The
Owl Edition"), because it has an owl on the cover. Two more editions were published before 1957. The copyrights have since expired from the two first versions, and they are now in
public domain.
In the 1990s, the
University of Linköping started
Project Runeberg with the intention of providing digital copies of old printed
Nordic – just as
Project Gutenberg aims to do with English Literature. In 2001, technology had improved enough to allow a full scale digitalization of the entire encyclopedia using
scanning and OCR (
optical character recognition) techniques. All 45,000 pages (counting both encyclopedias) have so far been scanned and OCR read, and are publicly available on the runeberg webpage. However, there still remains much proof reading to be done.
Reference:
*
Preface to the Digital Edition by Lars Aronsson, 2003
*
Nationalencyklopedin (1989-1996)
*
Logo of the first edition (71876)
*
Images from Nordisk familjebok*
Nordisk familjebok -- both editions (45,000 pages) are available online through
Project Runeberg
