FAIR Artifacts of Medical History. Indexing of human and veterinary medical historical objects as digitised sources for research and teaching using the example of metadata exported from a collection management system into library catalogues and portals.

• Applicants: Eva Fuhry; Privatdozentin Dr. Veronika Goebel
• Subject Area: Data Management, Data-Intensive Systems, Computer Science Methods in Business Informatics ; Orthopaedics, Traumatology, Reconstructive Surgery ; Veterinary Medical Science ; History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 549029470

Scientific-historical collections contain diverse and valuable material sources that have so far only been used locally and to a limited extent as research sources and teaching aids. The aim of the FAIR Artifacts project is to make suitable object collections accessible as digitised material sources for interdisciplinary research and teaching, to make them findable and usable for third parties regardless of location, and to link-up material sources. With FAIR Artifacts, the applicants would like to implement material sources from different areas and institutions and presented in both a scientific but non-specialist interface, and scientific research systems. As a pilot project, they are testing how disparate digitised objects from different institutions can be brought together on one platform, presented and opened up for different research interests beyond their original collection context through networkable open metadata. The new FAIR Artifacts portal to be developed should benefit from the established IT structures of the university libraries and library networks, their supraregional and international cooperating research systems and their developments for research data management. This also includes that the digitised subject sources accessible in the portal are referenced in library catalogues in order to make them easily findable for researchers together with the corresponding literature. The FAIR Artifacts project aims to index material sources in a museum documentation software level with the comprehensive use of standards and authority data in order to generate metadata at a quality-assured. Subsequently, to then present them automatically from the documentation software in a factual source portal geared towards scholarly needs. The enrichment of metadata with standards data from established thesauri during indexing or data migration should be seen primarily in terms of the findability and cross-linking of data. Authority control support the connectivity to knowledge graph systems in which digitised collections can be viewed from multiple perspectives. The project will initially develop two object collections that are important for interdisciplinary research and teaching and make them permanently available for free use by third parties: a collection of veterinary instruments for gynaecology, andrology and reproductive medicine, the most socially and economically important areas of veterinary medicine, and the clinical picture collection of the surgeon Friedrich von Esmarch with 1000 original and handwritten annotated portraits showing surgical patients between 1842 and 1898.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Participating Institution: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München ; Universitätsbibliothek
• Co-Investigators: Alexander Berg-Weiß; Vanessa Finger; Andreas Frech; Jaime Penagos; Privatdozent Dr. Sven Reese