Department for cultural and museum informatics

The responsibility of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum concerns the collecting, cataloguing and mediating of cultural-historical objects and the exploration of history.

With the all-encompassing digital changes, i.e. the existence of all analogue processes in digital transformation, a new area of work was created concerning the practice and theory in the transmission of digital cultural heritage. This involves the exploration of the accompanying transformation processes, of the creations of goals, cross-linking and knowledge storage and cultural memory in a digital society. This is a new area of activity in an internationally linked, computer-based environment. The department works closely on a national and international level with the Department for Computer-Based Cultural Studies of the ICS FORTH, the Institut Informatik 8, Artificial Intelligence of the  Friedrich Alexander Universität/Erlangen, and the Biodiversity Informatics of the Zoologisches Forschungsmuseums (Zoological Research Museum), Alexander Koenig, Bonn.

With this thought in mind, the IT component is divided into at least three basic areas of activity: maintenance of the technical infrastructure, availability and development of the application infrastructure at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum and the investigation of digital transformation in the area of cultural heritage.