Werkstattbericht Digitale Provenienzforschung: Inventarkarten zur Erschließung der Lehrmittelsammlung der Kunstgewerbeschule Pforzheim. Ein Pilotprojekt mit Scans, Python und museum-digital

Description

Abstract (English)

The BMFTR-funded research project KUPFER is dedicated to researching the media and design history of the historical teaching materials collection of today's School of Design at Pforzheim University. This collection reflects around 150 years of design education. It once comprised several thousand objects, including original jewelry, plaster casts, taxidermy specimens, templates, and glass slides. The workshop report focuses on the digital cataloguing and processing of the historical jewellery inventory, whose objects are now preserved in the Pforzheim Jewellery Museum. As part of a pilot project, the associated inventory cards were digitised and automatically read out using a Python script developed specifically for this purpose (Mathias Zinnen, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg). The structured data sets generated in this way are not only prepared for content analysis, but can also be mapped to the ontology of museum-digital. The report provides insight into the practical process of digitization, discusses technical and conceptual decisions, and reflects on the potential of such procedures for collections with more limited human and financial resources. Initial ideas for further analysis of the material in relation to spatio-temporal collection structures and network formation are presented.

These are the slides from the presentation that took place on July 16, 2025, as part of the online series Digital Provenance Research in University Collections – Workshop Reports.