Joseph Heller's (1798-1849) Graphics Collection at the Bamberg State Library - Visualisation and Integration of a Collection Structure

• Applicants: Dr. Christian Bracht; Professorin Dr. Bettina Wagner, since 11/2016
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2016 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 317529425

After the death of the merchant and art scholar Joseph Heller (1798-1849), a local of the Franconian town of Bamberg, the then Royal Library of Bamberg, now Bamberg State Library, inherited his complete written records as well as his book and art collection. The extensive inheritance left by Heller, consisting of graphic prints and hand drawings is the core of the locally kept stock of graphics. As the aim of this project, this graphics collection, which is internationally significant, but hardly known outside circles of professional experts is intended to be digitalised on two levels and made accessible. Within a project framework, the focus will be on a conglomerate of about 2,800 graphic prints. This corpus, containing works by Dürer, Cranach and Holbein is dominated by numerous copies from the 16th to the 19th centuries which since their origination have pervaded the art market as artistic references, copies, and at times as counterfeits, and which are referenced to the originals in the Heller collection. These later copies, often printed in groups on a single sheet, are an expression of the Dürer reception, of the persistent marketability in an international context, as well as of Heller's unique passion as a collector. Especially in the case of Dürer, he added meticulously detailed, hand-written comments and listed the works in his art-historical publications. The 2,800 sheets are to be digitalised at high resolution and catalogued by cataloguing and digitalisation standards defined collaboratively in the international project team Graphik vernetzt. To illustrate the collection history, the Bamberg State Library will carry out a virtual merger of this segment of the corpus with the other parts of the remaining Heller inheritance. This integration with common library possessions will be achieved by re-implementing the search server as well as the local research and presentation interface. This will ensure barrier-free, user-friendly and integrated visualisation of the project results on all end devices. As a second cataloguing step, and inspired by Heller's original idea of creating references, the digitalised prints will be fed into the international collaborative database Graphikportal being established at the German Documentation Centre of Art History - Image Archive Foto Marburg. For this purpose, the informational units for the description of graphic sheets will be named, referenced, and displayed for the first time using the relational model FRBRoo. This will allow systems, among other things, to connect all copies of a printing plate, but also the preliminary drawings as well as later prints, and to make them accessible through one single search result. Furthermore, the datasets created on the basis of the international meta data schema LIDO will be linked to person and title information in the integrated authority file (GND) and enhanced according to the international classification standard Iconclass by indexing the subjects.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Matthias Groß
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Werner Taegert, until 11/2016