Digitisation of foundation documents and statutes as well as matricula and personnel registers of the Baden-Württemberg university archives in Freiburg, Heidelberg, Hohenheim, Stuttgart and Tübingen

• Applicants: Dr. Marianne Dörr; Professor Dr. Ulrich Fellmeth; Dr. Ingo Runde; Professor Dr. Dieter Speck; Dr. Helge Steenweg
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Medieval History ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 415666607

The basic idea of the project, jointly applied for by the university archives of Baden-Württemberg, is to make digitised sources on similar functional areas and contents available to research beyond the boundaries of the participating archives in a concerted action. This approach not least serves the specific needs of research on university history, which very often takes an inter-institutional approach. The supra-regional importance of the project results not only from this fact, but also from the fact that universities have a supra-regional to international personnel catchment area, that they are focal points of many supra-regional to international biographies as training places for academic professions and as places of scientific activity and that their contributions to research and innovation also have an effect far beyond the regional sphere.The selection of the subject areas and source genres for this project is already induced for each university by the research interests continuously formulated in the form of inquiries. The joint approach of Baden-Württemberg's university archives also creates added value compared to a measure related only to one or a few institutions.The applicants see it as both a challenge and an opportunity to offer a comparable source basis for the typologically broad spectrum they represent. It ranges from the universities founded in the Middle Ages with the classical subjects (Heidelberg 1386, Freiburg 1457, Tübingen 1477) to the schools and later universities (Hohenheim 1818, Karlsruhe 1825, Stuttgart 1829) established in the 19th century with the new canon of technical and scientific subjects and the scientific foundation of agriculture (Mannheim 1907, Constance 1966) to the foundations of the 20th century.The source corpora to be digitized are selected in such a way that all university archives are represented, even if the described spectrum is accompanied by strong differences in the stock structure. A type of source to be contributed by all participants are the founding documents and statutes. Likewise a broad common participation is possible with the central lists of persons.This first joint proposal of the university archives in Baden-Württemberg is to serve as a basis for further digitisation projects, which could also include types of sources from the remaining core tradition such as committee documents (Senate protocols) and doctoral certificates or also pictorial materials.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Daniel Wilhelm