Digitalization and indexing of the collection of coins, medals, paper money, and copies of seals of the German Maritime Museum – Leibniz Institute for Maritime History (DSM) and the Historical Museum Bremerhaven

• Applicants: Kai Kähler; Professor Dr. Sebastian Vehlken
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Art History ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 561426662

The depiction of maritime themes occurs often in miniature work of art, especially on coins, medals, seals and paper money. Across epochs and cultures, symbolic and ideal aspects of artistically designed creations are visible to this day: For instance, nautical motifs serve as metaphors to depict persons or their rule. The DSM and the Historical Museum possess relevant interregional collections in this subject area from antiquity to modern times. The DSM has dedicated itself to the analysis of maritime topics on a global scale under the motto ‘Humans and the sea’. The Historical Museum Bremerhaven focuses on the classification of regional history with regard to questions of social-, cultural- and economic history. In addition to information about trade and the historical changes in the area at the mouth of the Weser, the coins at the Historical Museum also provide information about the use of the coins or the dating of the context of the finds. Through the digitalization of their coin, medal, seal and paper money collections, the DSM and the Historical Museum would like to establish the basis for the further research in different disciplines, such as numismatics, archaeology, history and art history. The necessary work will take place concurrently in both museums. At the Historical Museum the acquisition or supplementation of the metadata will take place as part of a participative citizen science project. At the DSM, the work will be accompanied by an improvement in the accessibility of the collection in the new research depot.The acquisition of a high quality photo equipment for flat objects with diameters up to 50 cm contributes to the development of the museum’s digital infrastructure for research and communication. The online-portal KENOM (Kooperative Erschließung und Nutzung der Objektdaten von Münzsammlungen – https://www.kenom.de) will be used to make the digitized holdings openly accessible and reusable. In addition, indexing will take place using standard vocabulary, such as that of the GND (Gemeinsame Normdatei) of the German National Library. This provides a cross-national standardized network with other collections and makes a further contribution to the establishment of an overall virtual numismatic cabinet. In addition to networking and interlinking the institutions, the cooperation of both museums should also encourage the collaboration with other local and regional cultural heritage institutions, for example, with regard to the digital visualization of holdings via other portals, such as the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek or the Kulturportal Niedersachsen.

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