The Digital Network for Collections assisted a seminar taught by Dr. Christine Beese at Freie Universität Berlin in the digital processing and pilot documentation of archival materials.
In the course, Christine Beese and her students worked with a partial estate of the Italian architecture critic Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946), which has been held since the early 1970s in the Art History Institute’s archive at FU Berlin. In the first half of the 20th century, Ojetti was among the pivotal figures in nationalist and fascist cultural circles in Italy.
Part of the module “Praxis und Vermittlung,” the seminar sought not only to engage substantively with the textual and photographic documents in the estate, but also to explore archival processing, digital documentation, and public presentation together.
As a pilot digital documentation environment, the Digital Network for Collections set up a „data hotel” using the Directus database application. This allowed students to digitally record and catalog selected archival materials.
Our data-hotel concept proved very successful: employing a modern, powerful, and highly configurable interim software solution enabled students to practice all stages of digital documentation hands‑on – from designing a data model to entering records and linking to reference data.
From this project seminar emerged a digital exhibition on the DDBStudio platform:
Die Waffen der Kunst – Ein Blick ins Arbeitszimmer des italienischen Kunstkritikers Ugo Ojetti (The Weapons of Art – A Glimpse into the Study of Italian Art Critic Ugo Ojetti)
The insights gained from digitizing this portion of Ugo Ojetti’s estate provide a strong foundation for potentially undertaking full-scale digitization of the collection as part of a future research project.
