The picture archive of Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in the GDR – digitization and indexing

• Applicant: Dr. Iris Edenheiser
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Art History ; Modern and Contemporary History ; Sociological Theory ; History of Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 557578029

The photographic heritage of the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden (DHMD) today includes around 20,000 prints/negatives, most of them document the international educational activities of the museum as the central institution of health education in the GDR. Among other things, they show the production of educational media in the museum's own workshops, the design of (international) health exhibitions, trips abroad by DHMD employees to countries in the Global South and participation in industrial trade fairs. It is therefore a coherent collection that is unique in its orientation and contains diverse and hitherto unnoticed sources on the history of health education in the GDR, which are not only of interest for history and the history of medicine, but also for cultural studies, art history or sociology. A two-year digitization project is to be initiated in order to make these holdings digitally accessible for research and for a broad (specialist) public for the first time. 5,000 prints/negatives are to be digitized and long-term archived, inventoried and indexed. As a result, data sets with extensive metadata will be created for the individual photographs, which will be made available digitally to the scientific community in comprehensive portals. In addition to the online database of the DHMD, the data sets are to be passed on to Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek and, possibly, to Europeana. Through extensive preliminary work, the DHMD has extensive experience in the digitization and provision of its holdings. Digitization standards have already been developed, free licenses have been granted and datasets have been passed on to overarching portals.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)