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PROTECTING CULTURAL IMPORTANT WRITINGS WITH NEW METHODS IN 
REPRODUCTION AND ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING 
M. Jobst 
Jobstmedia Präsentation Verlag, Welzeneggerstrasse 84, A-9020 Klagenfurt, Austria 
markus@jobstmedia.at 
KEY WORDS: Archiving, Photography, Recording, Cultural Heritage, Digitisation, Education 
ABSTRACT: 
The engraving remaining of a culture or society are those results, their people created in art or developed for technical progress. 
Especially documents with stories and interpretations of an era are most important and informative. A loss of this work and its 
content is irretrievable. Therefore it is useful to find new ways of documentation and recording techniques to maximise the 
persistency and the consciousness toward the cultural object in a wide public. 
Digital techniques produce excellence results in reproduction, but the question of steadiness of the digital data is controversal. The 
archiving of analogue reproductions is more conclusive. 
In case of publication and accessibility, digital media's, like internet databases and ebooks, are unsurpassable and are used 
worldwide. 
The conclusion is that there is the necessity to combine analogue and digital technologies to guarantee the persistency of the 
reproduced material on one hand and to enable a worldwide accessibility to the digital objects on the other hand. 
This paper shows and discusses a possible way for an enduring saving of extraordinary writings with the help of the project “the 
digital library of St.Paul”. The points of emphasis are the quality and persistency of the reproduced material, the processing of the 
film including the digitising and the use of different digital technologies for the publishing. 
1.INTRODUCTION 
The discovery of printing around the year 1434 by Johannes 
Gensfleisch Gutenberg started a new era in literary cultural 
heritage. From that date onward it was possible to publish 
books to a wide public. Literature that used this way of 
distribution still exists nowadays, in opposition to many 
individual examples of books - handwritings - that were lost 
during time. 
From that point of view the simple distribution is an efficient 
way to save cultural heritage, without at this point taking into 
account the used medium. 
like literature, pictures, sound and films is nearly everyone’s 
practice. Often several examples of one object may be found on 
one computer. Just from looking at the distribution we can be 
sure that we will, find these objects - in any form - in the future 
after thousands of years again. 
But saving culture isn’t that easy. The persistency of an object 
is depending on the medium it consists of or is put on. 
According to digital media not only the object has to survive, 
also a tool for playing this media is needed. 
The following article describes the project “digital library 
St.Paul”, its way of recording, the used file format and the 
planned way of publishing. 
In the time of Gutenberg it was an outstanding effort to produce 
several examples of one book in a relatively short time. 
Nowadays the digital technologies develop very fast, file 
formats change permanently and the copying of cultural objects 
Picture 1: the Coberger bible 1478 
Picture 2: the first printed book, missale romanum speciale 
abbreviatum, 1438?