Digitisation and Indexing of Portraits From the Archives of the Leibniz Association (DigiPortA)

Project Description

DigiPortA was jointly run by nine institutions from the Leibniz Association, led by the Deutsches Museum Archives in Munich.

The project primarily aimed at increasing the visibility of the Leibniz Association's archives by using the the portrait resources, making biographic image sources accessible to researchers and the public via an internet portal.They were indexed according to archival standards. Further information regarding the people portrayed and the photographers are given. The reference to individual provenance and a description of the respective collection of origin enable access of these collections for historical-biographical research.

Roughly 33,000 portraits of people working in science, technology, engineering, industry, architecture, the arts, seafaring professions, mining, geography and pedagogy were compiled. Besides researching individual biographies, it is thus possible to investigate the portrayal of professions and the social ranking of professional groups.

Chronologically these collections of portraits and participating archives focus on photographs from the 19th and 20th century; but many engravings are also presented.

In the project about 300 portraits from the BBF archive were indexed, digitised und made accessible in the joint database via the internet. The protraits from private and professional contexts show teachers, pedagogues (e.g. Adelheid and Marie Torhorst, Hugo Gaudig, Berthold Otto, Adolf Reichwein), staff members of the Academy for Pedagogical Sciences of the GDR and group photographs of teacher associations.

• BBF portraits in DigiPortA

Cooperations

• Deutsches Museum Archives (Munich)
• Archiv des Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseums (Bremerhaven)
• Montanhistorisches Dokumentationszentrum (montan.dok) beim Deutschen Bergbau-Museum (Bochum)
• Deutsches Kunstarchiv (German Art Archive) im Germanischen Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg)
• Senckenberg German Entomological Institute (Müncheberg)
• Archive for Geography at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Leipzig)
• Image Archive at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe  (Marburg)
• Archive of the Research Library for the History of Education (BBF) at the DIPF (Berlin)
• Scientific Collections of the Leibniz Institute for Regional Development and Structural Planning (Erkner)

Overall project management:

Dr. Wilhelm Füßl (German Museum, Munich)

Funding

The project was funded by the Leibniz Competition 2012, Funding Line Networks for three years.

Project Management

Project Details