With 1.2 million objects, the German Museum of Books and Writing is one of the biggest museums of its kind. Many parts of it have been digitised so that they can also be accessed electronically. The data generated in this way can be used not only to search for certain terms or types of artefact; they can also be linked with data from other museums, archives and libraries. An analysis of the data itself can also provide information about historical contexts.

Catalogues and cataloguing codes

A large amount of data about the objects in the Museum’s collection is stored in the catalogue. These data records provide information about the type of object, who made it, when and where it was made, what material it was made of and where exactly in the Museum it is located. With this information, it is possible for example to find all the objects that were made in a certain place at a certain time or all objects made by a certain person. As museums, archives and libraries now keep electronic records of their collections this information can be linked in the internet. However, this means that the data must be generated in accordance with a standard system or be standardised after generation.

Image gallery "From object to data record"

Image / Video 1 / 4

Donato Giannotti: Res publica venetum. Neuburg an der Donau: 1557. Copy held by the German Museum of Books and Writing.

Pagination

: Handgeschriebene Titelkarte aus dem alten alphabetischen Katalog des Museums, geschrieben vor dem 2. Weltkrieg. …

At the beginning of the millennium, libraries worldwide agreed to record information about their books and materials in accordance with standard rules. These rules are known as RDA (Resource Description and Access). As the German Museum of Books and Writing contains a great many books of historical importance, we adopted these library rules and adapted them to meet the Museum’s specific needs. This means we can record not only the author, title and publisher of a book, but also information about the paper, cover, watermark, binding and other characteristics. Anyone seeking books bound using a specific process or printed on special paper can look for them in the Museum’s online catalogue.

Integrated Authority File

Leipzig, Lipsia, Leipsic

Three spellings of the publishing location Leipzig taken from historic publications in the Museum's collection. Montage: DNB, André Wendler

Many of the artefacts in the Museum’s collection are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Names and spellings used for the same places and people often changed considerably over time, in the same way as different languages use different words, e. g. for the city of Leipzig. We use authority data to ensure that users can search library and museum catalogues with no knowledge of the spellings used throughout history. One of the most important collections of authority data in the German-speaking countries is the Integrated Authority File (GND). If various cultural institutions use the same authority data in their catalogues, this means that the data can be linked. At our museum, we have been using the Integrated Authority File for years; we are also helping develop it further for museums, archives and other cultural institutions, for example as part of the project GND for Cultural Data (GND4C).

Data interfaces and projects

The catalogue data from the German Museum of Books and Writing is available free of charge for general use under the Commons Zero 1.0 (CC0 1.0) license. Our data services supply the data in various formats for subsequent use, e.g. RDF, Turtle, MARC21-xml and others.
We regularly make individual data sets available during the course of projects, and request the help and participation of data experts in the fields of digital humanities and data science, hackers and citizen scientists to open up new perspectives on the Museum's cultural heritage.