About the project

Besides being a particularly precious part of the collection, the Individual Graphic Sheets of the Albrecht Haupt Collection (GESAH) are so unique and cover such a broad contextual and technical spectrum that they offer the greatest potential to international researchers of construction and fine arts. And yet this collection is only known to a very small circle of experts who were only able to use parts of it for their work. The key problems are the lack of specialist indexing and the difficulty in accessing the sheets. In this respect, the collection’s heterogeneity poses the greatest challenge.

After having been rearranged several times and reorganised in part over the past decades, the Individual Graphic Sheets are presently arranged only rudimentarily by formal and geographical criteria, and indexed in a card file system. Since it is not possible to systematically access the graphic sheets by content or to specifically search them by subject, their usability is severely restricted. The aim of the project is to fully digitise this high-quality stock of Individual Graphic Sheets from the collection that researchers from home and abroad have found difficult to access in the past. In the future, the items will be indexed by subject and made freely accessible online in a bid to give new impetus to research in this area.

Inadequately indexed graphics collections such as the Albrecht Haupt Collection are predestined for collaborative processing with the use of digital and virtual methods, because they appeal to different (expert) communities. Processing is therefore carried out in close cooperation with project partners from various specialist disciplines who are based at various departments of TIB and at the Chair of History of Architecture and Urban Development at Leibniz Universität Hannover’s Institute for History and Theory of Architecture.

The project, which has been running since 2019, comprises three main areas of activity and objectives, which will be supplemented by further components as part of the three-year continuation project (GESAH+) that began in April 2023:

1. Digitisation

The as yet undigitised objects of the individual graphic sheets (GESAH), the bound prints and the autograph travel sketches (GESAH+) of the Albrecht Haupt Collection will be digitised in accordance with the DFG's rules of practice and included in the Rosetta long-term archive.

2. Indexing

a. For all individual graphic sheets and graphic volumes, basic indexing will be carried out on the basis of existing information and provisional attributions.
b. The subset of unique architectural drawings will be subject to in-depth indexing. In this context, the provenance history and collection genesis will also be analysed for the first time. The results of this work are documented in the publication "Architekturzeichnungen der Sammlung Albrecht Haupt" (ed. by Markus Jager and Simon Paulus, Petersberg 2023).

3. Indexing environment

Based on the Vitro software, an indexing environment geared towards subject-specific requirements (accessible since March 2023 at sah.tib.eu) will be set up for spatially and temporally decoupled processing in expert dialogue. This should form the technical framework and cataloguing environment for further in-depth cataloguing of the entire GESAH collection for subsequent projects. Data, data model and software are also to be made available as open source to comparable cataloguing projects.

4. Interface to NFDI4Culture

The cataloguing environment developed in the first phase on the basis of the open source software Vitro and published in March 2023 will be further developed as part of GESAH+ and linked to the National Research Data Infrastructure for Culture (NFDI4Culture). Based on a particularly complex group from the subset of architectural drawings, a controlled vocabulary and an interoperable ontology will be developed for the category of master stamps or master marks, which will be published and made reusable within the NFDI4Culture infrastructure as a use case, linked to the GESAH Vitro instance via a newly developed interface.