Among the special subject collections of the German National Library of Medicine, Cologne, is physical anthropology, a field field of research that became an academic discipline subject only in the 19th century. The body of specialized literature on Physical Anthropology is comparatively small and can be well defined, thus offering good preconditions for its retrodigitization. Different types of sources are involved, including printed publications as well as research data in the form of manuscripts, notes, letters, drawings and sketches.
The retrodigitization project started by the ZB MED aims at the preservation of printed works and handwritten material concerning physical anthropology and to make these documents available for research. For this purpose, it will provide scientists and scholars with an access point for studying and analyzing them, build a database for all kinds of images and enrich these data with historical material from other institutions, e.g. archival documents and letters. The emphasis will be on the estate of two eminent 19th century academics: Hermann Schaaffhausen (1816–1893), professor at Bonn university and the first to identify and describe the “Neanderthal man”, and the Berlin physician and pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), who was Schaafhausen’s opponent in scientific matters.
The ZM MED will also make sure that valuable parts of its holdings from other disciplines are likewise preserved by digitization and enriched with documents form other institutions. In this context, we are aiming at establishing a network of cooperation between libraries, archives and museums.
The presentation will discuss strategies for handling research data form the field of physical anthropology that are to be stored electronically, e.g. which problems arise in the process of retro digitization, and how these data can be made available in an online portal. The already existing “Digitale Sammlung” of the ZB MED (http://s2w.hbz-nrw.de/zbmed) will serve as an example for demonstration. The focus will be on the integration of research data obtained from cooperative partners, on the development of relevant metadata and on search options in the database.