Staatliche Museen zu Berlin

To this day the approximately 1.000 acquisition books of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (SMB) from the years 1650 to 2010 form the inventory record of the 15 national collections and reflect the eventful history of Berlin‘s museums, their holdings and their development. For more than a quarter of a millennium, the handwritten reports have documented the conditions of access, previous ownership, circumstances of discovery, and later losses or relocations. The historical documents include outstanding collection highlights such as Nefertiti, the Mschatta Façade, Botticelli masterpieces, and precious Piranesi drawings. Since 2014, new additions to the collections have been documented in electronic form.

The digitisation took place between 2019 and 2022 as part of the research project „Provenance and Holdings. Online Publication of the Acquisition Books of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin", initiated and funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

• Project funding: Federal Ministry of Culture and Media (BKM)
• Project management: Prof. Dr. Andreas Bienert and Florentine Dietrich, M.A.
• Research team: Valentina Salcedo Paparoni, M.A. (project coordinator), Tatjana Antipanova, Maximilian Kostka, Sarah Mewes, Franziska Steffen
• Duration: November 2019 to October 2022
• Link to the project site