halbat

halbat private

Private archive of the press in Vorarlberg, from 1793 to today.

Request access
1 / 10How often wolf, bear and lynx come up per thousand articles in the Vorarlberger Nachrichten and on VOL.AT, from 1999 to 2026.
1 of 10
halbat trends for wolf, bear and lynx in two newspapers
How often wolf, bear and lynx come up per thousand articles in the Vorarlberger Nachrichten and on VOL.AT, from 1999 to 2026.
halbat holdings, every source on one timeline with a chart of pages per year
All holdings on one timeline, from 1793 to today.
halbat holdings detail of the Feldkircher Zeitung with a grid of years and the issues of 1906
Every year and every issue of a newspaper at a glance, here the Feldkircher Zeitung from 1861 to 1906.
A page of the Feldkircher Zeitung from 26 May 1906, scan on the left and its text on the right
A page from 1906 with the scan beside its searchable text.
halbat search for Hochwasser up to 1925, hits from state parliament records and old papers
Search across state parliament records and old papers, here up to 1925.
halbat trends, sections of VOL.AT since 1998 as bar rows per thousand articles
Which sections of a news site grew or shrank since 1998.
halbat article history with two versions and the date of the change
Every change to an article is kept with the date it happened.
Grid of years of the Vorarlberg state parliament records
156 of 166 years of Vorarlberg state parliament records since 1861, with the gaps of both world wars.
List of sixty historical periodicals with years and OCR quality
Sixty historical periodicals from 1793 on, each with its years, gaps, pages and measured OCR quality.
Results of the 2024 state election in Dornbirn
Results of the 2024 state parliament election in Dornbirn, with a turnout of 62.6 percent.
TechPython, FastAPI, SQLite with FTS5, SvelteKit, Tesseract
SinceFebruary 2026
Accesson request

A lot of what happens in Vorarlberg is only ever reported on vol.at and local news sites can vanish. The site feldkirch.com would have been a goldmine, but it now redirects to vol.at and only fragments of it remain on the Wayback Machine. Halbat started in February 2026 as a private archive, just for me. Since July 2026 I also use it for research.

It now also covers ORF Vorarlberg and other regional news sites, historical newspapers from the Austrian National Library going back to 1793, papers held by libraries in Liechtenstein and Tyrol and the records of the Vorarlberg state parliament since 1861. Scans without a text layer go through Tesseract, so old pages set in Fraktur can be searched as well. When an article changes, the earlier version stays in the archive with the date of the change.

At the moment it holds about 2.4 million pages with full text.

Halbat is private. There is no public search and none of the texts are published, here or anywhere else. What you see on this page are views of the archive itself, not its content.

Access is only possible for non-commercial research. If you work on a research project that needs historical or regional press from Vorarlberg, you can ask for it. I look at every request myself, including who is asking, at which institution and for what. If I say yes, access goes to the named people of that one project and ends with it. Nobody gets a copy of the data.