Open Museum for Open Science for Open Society
A project of the TRA-Present Pasts and the BCDSS: University Collections as Heritage
Project management: Prof. Dr. Karoline Noack; Prof. Dr. Birgit Ulrike Münch
Research assistants: Alma Hannig (collection coordination), Elizabeth Stauß (project coordination), Carlos Pallan Gayol (IT)
The TRA Present Pasts-funded project ‘Open Museum for Open Science’ - a digital platform for the University of Bonn's museums and collections as heritage - is being developed as part of the university's excellence strategy. The aim of the project is to make the university's collections digitally accessible for research and teaching, thereby creating greater transparency. With the platform as an infrastructure, knowledge about the collections will be accessible on the one hand and the participation of diverse stakeholder groups in knowledge production will be made possible on the other. For this purpose, the data of the Bonn University Collections will be stored in a system which, on the one hand, allows a modern presentation and communication in accordance with industry standards and, on the other hand, an improved analysis of the contents. The project will also lay the foundations for a sustainable and viable future concept for the digitisation of the museums and collections as a whole and their valorisation as infrastructures for research and teaching.
Open Museum
The Open Museum project is realising a digital platform for the museums and collections of the University of Bonn. The aim is to make the collections accessible for research and teaching as well as for the general public. The various interests of the users are at the focus and will form the starting point for the development of the platform. It is intended to be a digital space for exhibitions and offers on current issues and topics that invites people here in Bonn and around the world to engage with the collections.
Aims:
Accessibility and transparency are an important basis for enabling work and research with the objects in the collections. They also enable the participation of interested groups and individuals who previously had no access to the objects and are therefore an important part of the democratisation of knowledge. In concrete terms, this means that as many people as possible in our society have access to knowledge and can participate in the production of new knowledge. Participation and involvement in research with the objects and collections also brings new forms of knowledge into the collection work.
The Open Museum aims to connect collections, science and people worldwide and encourage new research. Digitisation enables collections, museums and disciplines to network with each other. From today's perspective, this allows us to better understand how individual collections were created, where they come from and why they ended up here. Each subject poses its own questions about the objects and collections. Networking creates interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research that opens up new questions. New collaborations with museums and interested groups around the world are also created.
Actors:
Potential users and target groups of the Open Museum include researchers, students and teachers at the University of Bonn as well as employees of the University of Bonn and other universities, museums, educational and cultural institutions. The Open Museum aims to appeal to a broad public, from Bonn's citizens to schoolchildren and heritage societies worldwide.
Next Steps:
Creation of new digital platforms and database systems, starting with the collections of Bonn's Ancient American collections and the Egyptian Museum.
Dr. Cornelia Löhne
Custodian of the Botanic Gardens
„Very often you only think within the boundaries of your own discipline, but the ‘Open Museum’ project bridges these boundaries. I have met colleagues from other museums and collections and together we can benefit from each other's experiences and ideas. Two things I find particularly exciting: (1) the new digital platform will allow us to make our historical teaching collections of plant specimens and seeds visible for the first time, (2) during conversations about the history of our collections and their links to the colonial period, we recognised several connections between our institutions. Building on this, we have already developed some ideas for joint research projects.“
In search of clues in the museums and collections of the University of Bonn: object histories
The opening exhibition in the Knowledge Lab Uni Bonn (KLUB) in the P26 building will provide insights into object histories from the museums and collections of the University of Bonn until the end of March 2025. Researchers have embarked on a search for clues in order to find out the origin and acquisition history of the objects, i.e. to research their provenance. They ask: Who collected or acquired the objects, when and how? How and why did they come to the University of Bonn? The exhibition also examines the question of how museums can deal appropriately with objects from sensitive contexts.
The exhibition is also the pilot exhibition of the ‘Open Museum for Open Science for an Open Society’ project and presents the diversity of the teaching and study collections in Bonn. With its focus on provenance research, it also fulfils the current demand for transparency and openness of collections and demonstrates the great research potential of these institutions. For the first time, 25 institutions - museums, collections, archives and libraries - from the University of Bonn are participating in the exhibition.
Provenance research is shown in P26 in a multifaceted and practical way, in order to enter into dialogue with interested visitors about exciting, surprising and unusual stories of people, objects and collections from the University of Bonn.
