Digitisation / Cataloguing of non-textual objects: The founding collection of the Deutsches Museum: Creating a digital index

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolfgang M. Heckl
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2012 to 2016
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 203439832

The project focuses on the prototypical indexing and digitization of five hundred of the 1800 artefacts held in the Deutsches Museum’s founding collection. This selection of mathematics and physics artefacts, collected by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Academy Collection), has been accumulated over 140 years and is considered to be one of the most important scientific collections of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Germany. Its composition and range of objects exemplify the extraordinary variety of scientific disciplines and instrument categories of its time. The extension of the collection documentation and its scientific reassessment will create an important information resource, both for researchers of the history of science and technology and for the interested public. In the course of the project, an indexing methodology will be developed that can also be applied to other collections, compiling object-related information derived from research in the history of science. This will be made accessible to external researchers in a free online portal, in which selected information from the object documentation will be adjusted via a mapping function and converted into a European standard for the exchange of museum data. The data within the portal will then be opened to national and international repositories in the history of science and technology through the implementation of a harvesting interface.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)