The Digital Network for Collections assisted a seminar taught by Dr. Christine Beese at the FU Berlin in the digital processing and pilot documentation of archival materials.
During the course, Christine Beese and her students worked with parts of the estate of Italian architecture critic Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946), which has been held in the Art History Department’s archive at the FU Berlin since the early 1970s. In the first half of the twentieth century, Ojetti was a pivotal figures in nationalist and fascist cultural circles in Italy.
The module “Practice and Education” aimed not only to get students to engage substantively with the textual and photographic documents from the estate but also to get them to explore archival processing, digital documentation, and public presentation together.
The Digital Network for Collections set up a “data hotel” as a pilot digital documentation environment using the Directus database application. This allowed students to digitally record and catalogue selected archival materials.
Our data-hotel concept proved very successful: the modern, powerful, and highly configurable interim software solution allowed students to carry out all stages of digital documentation hands‑on—from designing a data model to entering records and linking reference data.
The outcome of this project seminar was a digital exhibition on the DDBStudio platform:
“The Weapons of Art—A Glimpse into the Study of Italian Art Critic Ugo Ojetti” (“Die Waffen der Kunst—Ein Blick ins Arbeitszimmer des italienischen Kunstkritikers Ugo Ojetti”)
The insights gained from digitizing this part of Ugo Ojetti’s estate have created a strong foundation for potentially undertaking the full-scale digitization of the collection as part of a future research project.
