Digitizing Jan Tschichold’s estate

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Patrick Rössler; Frank Scholze, since 1/2020
• Subject Area: Art History ; Communication Sciences ; Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 422319439

The project makes the estate of typographer Jan Tschichold freely available worldwide online. Jan Tschichold is one of the most important book and type designers of the 20th century. He worked in the context of the Bauhaus and had a lasting influence on typography after the Second World War. His estate has been kept at the German Museum of Books and Writing of the German National Library in Leipzig since 2006.The project has four objectives: firstly, the digitization of the estate; secondly, the provision of open access; thirdly, the indexing with linked data; and fourthly, scientific monitoring. Those parts of the estate have been selected for digitization whose publication online is legally possible. It is a total of approx. 18,500 sheets. Future users should get a clear picture of the availability of the collection: Materials that have been digitized are all freely available online worldwide. What has not been digitized can be consulted on site in the museum. For the digital reproductions, various channels of provision are subsequently selected. Via the digital catalogue of the German National Library, the metadata and digital copies can be searched, displayed and exported in bulk. The metadata is offered under a CC-0 license, the digital copies under another Creative Commons license. In addition, the data will be imported into the German Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, DDB) and Europeana. For indexing purposes, the digitized material is enriched with the vocabulary of the Integrated Authority File (Gemeinsame Normdatei, GND). This allows searching for all materials related to individual designs and book projects, clients, publishers, etc. For the first time, an electronically linked comprehensive catalogue of the designer's works is created. The scientific monitoring & evaluation is carried out in cooperation with the University of Erfurt, Faculty of Philosophy (Prof. Dr. Patrick Rössler). The collection is to be catalogued as true-to-life as possible for the purposes of media and design history researchers. At the end of the project, its results will be presented to the professional public in a one-day symposium. An edited volume documents the results.The project provides media and design history and contemporary designers with a significant digital collection for researching the history of book and type design in the transition from traditional to digital typography and contributes to its long-term preservation.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Elisabeth Niggemann, until 1/2020