Digitisation / Cataloguing of non-textual objects: Description and Digitization of Precious Book Covers as Independent Works of Art

• Applicant: Dr. Klaus Ceynowa, since 5/2015
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 248356741

Book covers as material objects occupy a special position between the text-centred collections held by libraries and those of museums, which are mainly oriented towards material objects. Based on a corpus of around 60 medieval and early modern metal book bindings and a collection of about one hundred Tibetan wooden book covers preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, this project aims at the development of exemplary modular standards of description for these independent works of art, and of testing and defining their integration into the standardized context of description and documentation in existing internet databases. The results of art-technological and scientific analysis will be published online together with available (art) historical descriptions and the digitized images of the objects themselves. The digitization of the book covers and bindings included in this project will be carried out in a camera-based workflow, drawing on the results of scholarly analysis. Depending on the digitization techniques employed, models for the presentation of these artefacts will be developed, for which recommendations will be formulated.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Dr. Rolf Griebel, until 5/2015