About the project

Besides being a particularly precious collection, the Albrecht Haupt Collection is unique and covers such a broad contextual and technical spectrum that it offers the greatest potential to international researchers of construction and fine arts. And yet this collection was only known to a very small circle of experts who were only able to use parts of it for their work. The key problems were the lack of specialist indexing and the difficulty in accessing the sheets. In this respect, the collection’s heterogeneity posed the greatest challenge.

After having been rearranged several times and reorganised in part over the past decades, the Individual Graphic Sheets had been arranged only rudimentarily by formal and geographical criteria, and indexed in a card file system. Since it was not possible to systematically access the graphic sheets by content or to specifically search them by subject, their usability was severely restricted. The aim in first phase of the project was 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. The items should be indexed by subject and made freely accessible online in a bid to give new impetus to research in this area. In the second phase of the project, the remaining sub-collections were incorporated into the indexing work: the bound prints, which are assigned to the monographs and have been catalogued in the library catalogue, as well as the so-called travel sketches, which consist primarily of Haupt’s own drawings, material intended for the publication of his research, and drawings by his students.

Inadequately indexed graphics collections such as the Albrecht Haupt Collection are predestined for processing with the use of digital and virtual methods, because they appeal to different (expert) communities. Processing was 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 projects covered the following three key areas:

1. Digitisation

The undigitised objects of the individual graphic sheets (GESAH), the bound prints and the autograph travel sketches (GESAH+) of the Albrecht Haupt Collection have been 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 was carried out on the basis of existing information and provisional attributions. The records and existing digital images of the so-called travel sketches were migrated from an older allegro C database.
b. The subset of unique architectural drawings were subject to in-depth indexing. In this context, the provenance history and collection genesis were 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 was set up (accessible since March 2023 at sah.tib.eu). This formed the technical framework and cataloguing environment for further in-depth cataloguing of the entire GESAH collection. Data, data model and software were also made available as open source to comparable cataloguing projects.

In addition, a Wikibase was developed for the classification and description of master’s seals, for which the specific collection of drawings from Nuremberg (Nürnberger Proberisse) was analysed. The instance was set up in collaboration with the NFDI4Culture team and made available for reuse, together with an illustrated glossary.