New project on the Berlin collection has just launched at the First Faulty of Medicine! Last time, I discovered that books marked by the former libraries Pépinière, Friedrich-Wilhelms-Institut, Kaiser-Wilhelms-Akademie, and Deutsche Ärzte-Bücherei were indeed moved to our medical library after 1945 and were not originally part of the collections, as was believed. For that purpose, a theme-collection on obstetrics was chosen as a sample.
Now my aim is to make a complete database of provenance entries in the whole collection of the faculty’s rare prints that once belonged to these Berlin institutions. Regardless of the topic.
I wish to connect the individual books with their original library-catalogue entries. Thus, the documentation of the library’s provenance will be improved. And the historic context of the 1945 transfer would be clarified.
Further visualisation with help of external data sources is to be enabled once the primary work is done.
First step will be building the database of shelfmarks (old ones as well as the current ones), and basic descriptions of the books. See you in a few weeks’ time, when the real fun begins.
Marketa Ivankova
