Address:
Central Custody
Weender Landstraße 2
37073 Göttingen
Opening hours/access:
keine
Contact person/contact:
Central Custody
Karsten Heck
Tel.: +49 (0551) 39-26693
E-Mail: heck@kustodie.uni-goettingen.de
Using selected image details from the digitised educational panels, the Plantala project was realised in 2020/21 as part of the Coding da Vinci Lower Saxony cultural hackathon and subsequently awarded a grant for further development. further information
The University of Göttingen (Central Custody) preserves a collection of over 2000 educational charts that have been used in the teaching of botany since the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, published series of teaching charts were acquired, on the other hand, individual charts were continuously produced for use in the lecture theatre, partly by the researchers and teachers themselves, mostly by the institute's draughtsmen. The informative and aesthetic visual material provides an overview of objects, topics and forms of presentation from the scientific teaching of botany over a century at the Albrecht von Haller Institute of Plant Sciences in Göttingen.
On the occasion of the transfer of the collection from the Albrecht-von-Haller Institute to the depot rooms of the Central Custody in summer 2018, the entire collection was photographed in high resolution (see here) and published here for free re-use. In the course of the photo campaign, the collection was re-inventoried and basic descriptive metadata was recorded, in addition to the title, e.g. information on production (persons/institutions). However, the informative content of the objects is still largely contained in the depictions themselves, which are often labelled in detail. As a rule, the specialised knowledge recorded on the plates is still relevant today, at least because of the clarity of the plant morphology. If taxonomic classifications and designations have been scientifically revised, then these plates are also scientific-historical sources that can be used to vividly trace the history of the communication of canonised teaching knowledge in the subject of botany.
Karsten Heck, 2020
