Since 2018, the Lexical Information System Austria (LIÖ) has served as the publication platform for all new WBÖ dictionary articles from letter F onwards. The preceding letter sections A-E (with approx. 75,000 keywords) of the WBÖ were published in printed volumes by the publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences between 1963 and 2015. The aim of the Retro-Digitization is firstly to record the contents of these printed WBÖ volumes as full texts and secondly to integrate them into LIÖ together with the successively newly published WBÖ articles and to publish them digitally.

The starting point is TEI-compliant XML data from the old WBÖ articles, which is then analyzed in depth using semantic tagging (information enrichment) without any changes being made to the content of the material. The result of the TEI-transformation is well-formed and valid TEI-compliant XML that is structurally aligned with the new WBÖ articles and can be flexibly integrated into the appearance of LIÖ through editorial post-processing and appropriate rendering. The semantic processing thus enables the integration of the old WBÖ articles into LIÖ, a higher searchability of all WBÖ articles (old and new) and thus also creates the basis for more interoperability. In addition to the retro-digitized articles, the digital copies of the original printed articles can also be viewed in LIÖ.

The Retro-Digitization is carried out in close cooperation with the infrastructure division of the ACDH and the publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.