Research into the early history of the academic collections in Göttingen and the virtual reconstruction of the former Academic Museum is a collaborative project in which - in addition to the collections themselves - numerous other partners on the Göttingen campus and beyond are involved.
The digitisation work and the publication of the digitised material are coordinated by:
Göttingen State and University Library
and
Central Custody of the University of Göttingen
Co-operations exist with:
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach-Online
Edition project of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Research project Collecting research
Contact person/contact:
Central Custody
Collections Management Department
Karsten Heck
Phone: +49 (0551) 39-20739
E-mail: heck@kustodie.uni-goettingen.de
Göttingen State and University Library
Dr Christian Fieseler
Phone: +49 (0551) 39-25280
E-mail: christian.fieseler@sub.uni-goettingen.de
In 1773, around forty years after the Georgia Augusta was founded, the Royal Academic Museum was opened as the university's central institution. Like the entire university, it was committed to Enlightenment ideals: Parallel to the establishment of a central library - and initially also under its roof - a collection of "naturalia" and "artificialia" was established. The objects served as material for research and teaching, but were also intended to be accessible to an interested public. Through the purchase of private natural history collections and the systematic acquisition of sometimes spectacular collections of objects, the Academic Museum quickly developed into a scientific institution with an impact far beyond Göttingen.
The Academic Museum of the University of Göttingen initially dates back to the purchase of the private collection of the scholar Christian Wilhelm Büttner (1716-1801) by the Georgia Augusta in 1773. Existing plans to establish a university museum thus received the decisive impetus for a rapid growth process of the collections from all three natural kingdoms as well as ethnographica, works of art and instruments. For the year 1840, the total holdings can be estimated at several tens of thousands of objects.
The term of office of the first administrator and later superintendent of the museum, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), is regarded as an important period of prosperity and consolidation for the museum. After Blumenbach's death and until the opening of the university's new Natural History Museum in 1878, the academic collections began to be differentiated into four departments: the mineralogical-geological under Johann Friedrich Hausmann (1782-1859); the zoological under Arnold Adolf Berthold (1803-1861); the anthropological-zootomical under Rudolf Wagner (1805-1864); the ethnographic under Johann Friedrich Osiander (1787-1855).
The Academic Museum was committed to didactics based on presentation and direct visualisation of the collection objects. The museum was the constitutive infrastructure of a research and teaching practice that generated knowledge through the attentive observation of objects and groups of objects; it served as a means of communication between scholars and with interested laypeople; finally, it functioned as a visual authentication authority for research results. It is this tradition of object-based research and teaching in which the Forum Wissen consciously places itself in order to use 21st century methods to make the university in its complex wholeness and the rootedness of knowledge in the materiality of things tangible and fruitful once again.
