The film collection of the Charité film studio: A pilot project to make the scientific films of the GDR accessible

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Volker Hess
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies ; History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 555308894

Based on the extensive film holdings of the Library and Collection Medical Humanities of Charité - Berlin University of Medicine (BSMH), the pilot project aims to describe and clarify the requirements for the digital recording, provision, and use of medical scientific films from the GDR. Along with it, a workflow will be developed in a second step together with other potential rights holders in order to make this film collection digitally available. For this purpose, a common vocabulary for recording will be defined, implemented in the open-source workflow software Goobi, and set out in a guideline. The long-term goal the institutions working together in this pilot project have set themselves is (i) to develop a central and generally accessible directory of the collections and (ii) to make them available for digital consultation. To this end, the proposed pilot project will carry out fundamental preliminary work, which will be operationalized in seven steps using a selected sample. The following will be developed (1) a controllable vocabulary / ontologies to clearly record the rights for copies, variants, etc. resulting from production, provenance, and ownership (2) to use it to prepare a workflow for rights clarification in the form of a metadata structure (3) to involve the (partial) rights holders in defining the roles and adapt the resulting access and usage models using the open source software Goobi for technical implementation (4) applied to a selected sample and tested in practice and finally, to summarize, document, and publish the tested procedure in a guideline for rights clarification. In the pilot project applied for a small number of around 30 to 50 film reels the rights will be clarified exemplarily, the metadata needed will be recorded in a structured manner, and the objects will be made available online in digital form for research and teaching via the portal Collection Medical History Charité and documented as a workflow.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: Austria
• Co-Investigators: Sophia Gräfe; Karsten Labahn; Carolin Pommert; Dr. Gunther Viereck
• Cooperation Partner: Katrin Pilz