F.A.Z. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

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Overview

First published on November 1, 1949, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is one of the major daily newspapers in Germany. Its intended scope covers a comprehensive range of topics in Germany and internationally.

Aside from the current news website (http://www.faz.net [1]), F.A.Z. offers three archival products that cover the entire previous history of the publication:

F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal contains more than 4 million text-searchable articles of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspapers (daily edition, Sunday edition) from 1993 to the present and other publications of F.A.Z..

F.A.Z. 49-92 contains more than 2.8 million text-searchable articles from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from the founding of the newspaper in 1949 until 1992.

Frankfurter Rundschau contains the digital articles of Frankfurter Rundschau since 1995.

Provider:

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH [2]

Posted:

Aug 3, 2011 3:59pm

Updated:

Oct 4, 2021 2:13pm

Source

CRL reviews are based on independent research. Information is researched by CRL staff and other specialists at CRL libraries. See CRL Review for additional source notes.

Details

Collection Content

Subject Areas:

Social Sciences

Resource Types:

Newspapers

Major Languages:

German

- Denotes data sourced directly from publisher

Content Details:


Geographic coverage	Primarily Germany; some international
Chronological coverage	F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal: covers 1993 to the present; F.A.Z. 49-92: covers 1949-1992
Content types	Newspaper
Source formats	F.A.Z. 49-92: converted from paper source; F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal 1993 to the present: electronic source from editing system (TRIP database conversion)
Total titles	1
Total pages	F.A.Z.49-92 = 2.8 million articles (350,000+ pages)
Digital collection launch date	F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal: April, 2004; F.A.Z.49-92: July, 2010.
Update frequency	F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal: daily update (current edition); F.A.Z.49-92 no updates (database is closed)
Collection ongoing	Y
Completion date	Ongoing
Available supplements	- Rhein-Main-Zeitung, supplement in the greater Frankfurt area, since 1993 - F.A.Z. Magazin from January 1996 to june 1999 - FAZ.NET articles (online-Version) since 1999

Specifications

Metadata:


MARC records available	N
Creator of MARC records
Structural metadata exposed anywhere?
Subject authorities used
Name authorities used

Technical Platform:


Browser compatibility	Compatible with recent versions of all common browsers
Authentication options	IP authentication
Archiving solution – master files	Articles are archived and classified in TRIP database by the publisher and then exported to an external host; dates are archived on server
Archiving solution – derivative files	NA
Availability in web discovery tools	NA
Open URL target	NA
Federated searching, z39.50	NA
Local host option	N
Usage statistics	Y (on request)

Interface Tools:


Full text displayed	Y (full text of all articles in both databases displayed in html)
Page images	PDF page images and PDF of articles available for all content in F.A.Z. 49-92. PDF page images available for F.A.Z.-BiblioNet since 2001, and PDF of articles since January, 2010.
Color images	N
Search full text	Y
Advanced search	Y (indexed by people, companies, industries, countries, and topics.)
Search within results	N
Limit results by dates and/or document types	N
Display highlighted search terms	Y
Display snippet -- search term in context	N
Relevance sorting	Y
Save searches	Y ("update")
Download PDF	Y
Download HTML	Y
Print page	Y
Print full document	Y
Export citations	N
Annotation tools	N
Cross-product searching	N
ILL	N
Restrictions on use	Use and loan restricted to IP-ranges licensed.

Terms and Provider Details

Terms:


	Options
Subscription option
Purchase option
Multiple-year payments option	N
Hosting charges	N
List of purchasers available	NA
Sample license available	NA
MARC records purchase fee	NA
Price tier basis

Provider:

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH [2]

Main Address:

Hellerhofstraße 2-4

60327 Frankfurt

Germany

CRL Review

Collection Content:

First published on November 1, 1949, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (F.A.Z.) is one of the major national daily newspapers in Germany. The paper publishes Monday to Saturday (the Sunday edition is called the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung [F.A.S.], but both are referred to here as F.A.Z.).

Published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH, F.A.Z. covers a comprehensive range of topics in Germany and internationally. The publisher notes that “As one of the most important media of the young Federal Republic the F.A.Z., since its very beginnings, has always greatly valued a large network of correspondents.” The four daily sections and inserts of the paper include economic, political, cultural, and science topics.

http://www.faz.net [1] (the online site for the publication) contains a wide range of articles, photos, videos, graphics, and supplemental material. The site also includes links to its E-Paper version, and has an Archive Search (https://fazarchiv.faz.net/ [3]) which permits searching of articles from 1993 to the present. Searching is free, but article viewing is restricted to subscribers or as pay-per-view.

F.A.Z. offers two archival products for libraries that cover the entire previous history of the publication:

F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal - https://www.faz-biblionet.de [4] (formerly "F.A.Z. BiblioNet" launched in 2004) is the library access portal to F.A.Z. online and contains ca. 2 million text-searchable articles of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspapers (daily and Sunday editions) from 1993 to the present, as well as online content from FAZ.NET from 1999 to the present, including exclusive FAZ-PLUS articles. The Bibliotheksportal also includes F.A.Z.-Woche ("FAZ weekly"), Frankfurter Allgemeine Quarterly and Metropol (F.A.Z.'s bi-monthly economic magazine) covering 2016 forward.

Articles are presented in HTML format. In addition, F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal offers full-page PDFs of the paper from 2001 to the present.¹ HTML results may not contain all graphics, photos or supplemental information of the print version, but the full-page PDFs contain all graphics, photos and pictures.
F.A.Z. 49-92 (launched in 2010) contains more than 2.8 million text-searchable articles from the historical archive of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from the founding of the newspaper in 1949 through 1992. This is intended to complete the digitization of the full run of the newspaper. The archive contains the articles in full text and also the articles and pages in PDF facsimile. F.A.Z. 49-92 also includes reports of the “Zeitung für Frankfurt” as well as the “Rhein-Main-Zeitung.”

According to the general terms and conditions of the digital archive, the following are not included in F.A.Z. 49-92: advertisements, business pages that include stock prices (Kursseiten), photos, cartoons, weather reports, events, and publishing supplements. Graphics, if available, are provided (according to this description [5], graphics are in the HTML version at the end of the page). The full-page PDF version contains all the graphics, photos, and images.²
Frankfurter Rundschau Archives (launched in 2013) covers digital articles for this title from 1995 onward (2 millon articles).³

According to the publisher, all modules can be purchased alone or in combination.⁴

Overlap with other products:

Article feeds (text only) for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung content were previously included in the LexisNexis and Factiva databases beginning with 1981. However, content was temporarily withdrawn from LexisNexis in 2005, and again from both sources in 2009.

As of October 2017, F.A.Z. is listed in Factiva's title list as "translated abstracts" covering 1981-2013. A user assessment of Factiva shows content is accessible from March 13, 2013 through present day. LexisNexis reports fulltext coverage from 2006, though content is restricted from the Academic market.

Since 2017, ProQuest “Global Newsstream” offers FAZ full-text articles covering 2017 to present.

According to the publisher, licenses with content aggregators do not have long-term clauses and are periodically reviewed "by both parties" to assess performance.⁵

Delivery:

Technical Platform and Interface

The F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal database is searchable in full text and contains additional index functions for people, companies, industries, countries, and topics. The publisher reports that the F.A.Z. 49-92 archive has the same data structure and indexing categories as F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal.

FAZ-Bibliotheksportal 4.0 was released in 2017, and features numerous interface enhancements from the last version released in 2012. In addition to full-text search (all text including titles, with option for Boolean operators to link several terms), advanced search allows for searches by topic or tagged criteria (subject, person, company, country, industry, etc.). Results can be sorted by date, relevance, or decade, and search results can also be filtered against tagged criteria provided.

The portal also offers an expert search ("expert mode") for advanced users seeking to use complex and diverse combinations of search criteria. F.A.Z. has also included provisions for text and data mining [6], subject to a separate license agreement, on a case-by-case basis.

Search possibilities in FAZ 49-92 may deviate from those in FAZ-Bibliotheksportal.

Update October 2019:

FAZ has reported that at this time they are not able to accept IPv6 addresses. They are working on this issue, and will communicate to CRL once this is resolved.

Terms:

General Terms and Conditions [7] are available via the F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal site. Some notable limitations in those terms include prohibition on off-campus access and a restriction on interlibrary loan. CRL is negotiating terms of access with the publisher to be more consistent with North American library expectations.

Rights to use F.A.Z. content beyond the general terms of F.A.Z.-Bibliotheksportal are documented on the rights section of the F.A.Z. site at: http://www.faz-rechte.de/startseite.htm [8]. See also the extensive brochure (in German) "Dahinter steckt immer ein original - Lizenzen und Rechte [9]."

One of the terms identified cited as objectionable in the current (2018) license is the indemnification clause (2.3). (See Comments.)

F.A.Z. modules are available as subscriptions via CRL.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

Comments from trial access to the database, June–August 2011:

-- The OCR seems to be overall fairly good quality. While some page image facsimiles appear somewhat pixellated, they are generally readable and clear.

-- The overall product and its capabilities are impressive. It would be helpful to make date browse features more clear: this can be accomplished through selecting a date range in the advanced search interface.

-- Regarding the interface, it would be preferable to be able to page through an entire issue in facsimile format at a time. Users can browse the database by date and download one page at a time, opening the page PDF file in Adobe, but cannot flip through the pages as they can in PressDisplay or a similar product.

Pricing quoted to American libraries for the current and historical archive database have been quite high in the past, but recently appear to be more reasonable.

Reviewers:

Center for Research Libraries

Judy Alspach - Project Coordinator
James Simon - Vice President, Collections & Services

Contributors:

Brigham Young University

Richard Hacken - European Studies Bibliographer

Harvard University

Sebastian Hierl - Librarian for Western Europe

University of California, Berkeley

James H. Spohrer - Librarian for the Germanic Collections

Sources

Sources for this review include information publicly posted or obtained directly from the publisher; data collected by CRL staff and specialists at CRL libraries; and examination of the digital collection when possible. Other sources are noted where cited. CRL continues to gather additional information on this resource and to solicit critical assessment.

Endnotes:

¹ More information available at: http://www.faz-rechte.de/faz-bibliotheksportal.htm [10].

² https://www.faz-biblionet.de/fazPortal/popup/SUCH_HILFE [11]

³Though an independent publishing and editorial company, "Frankfurter Rundschau GmbH" is owned in part by F.A.Z. with a 35 percent stake as of 2013. See: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/medien/zeitungen-die-frankfurter-r... [12]

⁴Per conversation with Archives staff 2017/10/11.

⁵Per conversation with Archives staff 2017/10/11. See content lists for LexisNexis Academic Source List [13] and in Factiva Publications [14].

CRL Offers & Status

Status	Current	Description
CRL Flagged	no	Potential interest to CRL community
Offer Pending	no	Currently a candidate for CRL offer
Active Offer	yes	Currently offered for purchase or new subscription
Trial Access	no	Available for trial
Renewal Offer	no	Currently offered for renewal
Expired Offer	no	Past offers
Inactive / Declined	no	No longer under consideration by CRL
Reviewed by CRL	yes	Evaluation available by CRL and community
Special Access	no	Member-only access available for a limited time

The complete offer and activity details for this resource are only available to CRL members.

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