Digitisation and Retro-Cataloguing

The retro-cataloguing project digitised entire selected books to preserve valuable holdings and make them available to scientific research. In a first step, the library’s inventory volumes were processed.

The key objective was to digitally assign this detailed information on each book’s acquisition, history and provenance to the respective collections, which makes it possible for scientific colleagues to access the library’s complete collection history. Further steps include fully digitising rare yet popular books. The auratic character of the original – in 2001 the Weltmuseum Wien’s library was recognised as a museum collection due to its extensive historical holdings – still remains accessible for visitors.       

A very special example of digitisation is the monumental two-volume book by the Dutch colonial official Engelbertus Schröder (1873–1936). It is the most comprehensive monograph on the Indonesian island of Nias and combines the author’s research on site as a district official between 1904 and 1909 with a review of the most important literature until the date of publication. Basically no new information was added to the presented knowledge until the second half of the 20^th century. Although most of Schröder’s theoretical positions are regarded as outdated, his detailed ethnographic observations are still of great significance. As a standard reference work, “the Schröder” influenced the entire Nias research of the 20^th century. Volume 1 (866 pages) comprises texts from the fields of ethnography, geography, and history; Volume 2 includes 147 tables and four maps. Particularly the photographs – reproduced by the editor by means of the elaborate rotogravure printing technique – boast an extraordinary clarity, which makes them invaluable to modern ethnography.