Nordisk familjebok

File:Bokrygg för uggleupplagan.jpg

Spine for the owl edition

Nordisk familjebok (en. Nordic familybook) is a Swedish encyclopedia, published between 1876 and 1957.

History

The first edition was published in 20 volumes between 1876 and 1899. The first edition is known as the "Iðunn edition" because of the picture of Iðunn 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 the public domain.

In the 1990s, persons active at the Linköping University 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.

• Nordisk familjebok 1876.png

  The logo of the first edition (1876-1899) features a depiction of Iðunn.

• Logo för Nordisk familjeboks uggleupplaga.png

  The Owl Edition (1904-1926)

References

• Preface to the Digital Edition by Lars Aronsson, 2003

See also

• Nationalencyklopedin (1989-1996)
• Images from Nordisk familjebok at Wikimedia Commons

External links

• Nordisk familjebok – both editions (45,000 pages) are available online through Project Runebergbn:নরডিস্ক ফ্যামিলজেকব