Unique source material on the German art trade: digitization and indexing of auctioneer's copies of the catalogues of the Munich auction house Hugo Helbing (1887 to 1937)

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Ulrich Pfisterer; Dr. Veit Probst
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2020 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451092879

The aim of the project is on the one hand the digitization and sustainable online provision of approx. 1,115 auctioneer's copies of the catalogues of the Munich auction house Hugo Helbing (1895 to 1937) on the servers of the Heidelberg University Library. The annotated copies usually contain not only complete information about the consignors - and thus provenances - of the auctioned artworks, but also about the buyers and the prices attained at the auction. This unique source material on the history of the German art trade is of exceptional importance for many research questions. On the other hand, the project will include the scientific description of the annotated catalogue copies, a typification and systematisation of the auction annotations as well as the development and evaluation of a model for their structured recording on the basis of the Heidelberg annotation tool heiANNO. With this editing, the project breaks new ground; there are no models or forerunners that allow orientation or even adaptation. Only the experiences gained by the ZI in a short-term project are comparable. In contrast to this project from 2013, in which the catalogues did not even extend over a decade (1936-1944), the Helbing catalogues run for exactly half a century (1887-1937). Generations of authorized officers, managing directors, partners and employees of Helbing were the authors of the various types of annotations (hand log, estimate prices/limits, over-the-counter sales record, records for authorities such as the Munich police department, etc.). One must therefore assume a much greater variety of entries.The heterogeneity of the annotations first requires the creation of a typology: Which systematics do the entries follow? What type of information has been recorded? These questions can only be answered when all digital copies of all catalogues (with a total of approx. 116,000 pages) are actually available and can be analyzed. In this context, and in the sense of a pilot project, it will also be necessary to develop an understanding of which annotation refers to which circumstances, because the entries do not always refer to consignors, the hammer price and buyers; limits can also be expected - sometimes encoded, in letters such as "RJHE" - or written bids. The greatest care and precision is required in this area because the information is of the highest relevance and ultimately even of legal significance worldwide for the claims of claimants and for provenance researchers to museums and collections.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)