Zurich Overnight Visitor Logs ("Nachtzedel")

Description

Data and metadata

The digital copies of the "Zürcher Nachtzedel (1780 to 1818)" were produced between 2023 and 2024 in the digitization center of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich and are published on the e-manuscripta.ch platform. This dataset contains the data published on e-manuscripta.ch to date (as of 2024-08): it relates to the volumes 1780 to 1784, which are also representative of later volumes of the "Nachtzedel".

In the "data" folder you will find the digitized data as JPEG files in maximum quality. They were downloaded from e-manuscripta.ch, where they are available as year dossiers, and then sorted by month in ISO date format (YYYY-MM). The download links and the internal order are taken from the METS metadata for the respective year dossiers, which can be found in the "metadata" folder. The METS-XML files originate from the OAI interface of e-manuscripta.ch.

Link to the catalog entry of all Nachtzedel in LKR 7 (= Laubenkastenraritäten der Stadtbibliothek Zürich) in zbcollections: https://zbcollections.ch/home/#/content/59a0e6bd68544cf5bbafb30de2276685

Link to the already published Nachtzedeln on e-manuscripta.ch.ch: https://www.e-manuscripta.ch.ch/search/quick?query=nachtzedel

History and context of the "Nachtzedel"

In Zurich - as in other towns - the council had been concerned since the 17th century about controlling which strangers were staying in the town's inns. From 1621, first the town hall servant and later a specially employed "night clerk" had to visit the inns every evening to record the names of their guests. The result of these efforts, the so-called "Nachtzedel", are an extremely interesting source today: Not only can the presence of famous contemporaries such as Goethe or Hölderlin be traced to the exact day, but also social-historical questions (fluctuation of tourism in certain periods, origin of travelers, etc.) can be answered by a statistical analysis of the data.

Unfortunately, only a few volumes of the Zurich "Nachtzedeln" from 1621 to 1831 (1780 to 1818) have survived at all, and as far as we know today, only in the Zurich Central Library.

From 1780, the night scribe Johann Konrad Ulrich introduced an innovation: he produced the notes in print. He had obtained the appropriate tools and type for this purpose. This process had two major advantages: The night scribe only had to insert or remove the newly arrived and departed persons when he left the record. At the same time, several copies could be made without any problems. Sometimes, however, the technology must have failed, as only handwritten notes have survived for individual days.

The "Nachtzedel" have not yet been published; although they are listed in the Central Library catalog, they are only known to a few specialists, as they are almost never mentioned in the literature. Research should benefit considerably from the digital availability of this interesting source.

There are 35 boxes of slips from the years 1780-1811, 1815-1818 and 1829, with one note per day. Some individual slips of paper or even larger time periods are missing. In total there are probably around 13,000 slips of paper. The print quality is excellent in many cases (apart from misspellings and unusual spellings, which depend on the night scribe's level of education), but often also rather mediocre (unclean printing, smudges, etc.). Nevertheless, OCR should produce good results. In contrast, around 5% of the notes are handwritten.