Project description

The project makes the estate of typographer Jan Tschichold freely available worldwide online. Jan Tschichold is one of the most important book and type designers of the 20th century. He worked in the context of the Bauhaus and had a lasting influence on typography after the Second World War. His estate has been kept at the German Museum of Books and Writing of the German National Library in Leipzig since 2006.

The project has four objectives: firstly, the digitisation of the estate; secondly, the provision of open access; thirdly, the indexing with linked data; and fourthly, scientific monitoring. Those parts of the estate have been selected for digitisation whose publication online is legally possible. It is a total of approx. 18,500 sheets. Future users should get a clear picture of the availability of the collection: Materials that have been digitised are all freely available online worldwide. What has not been digitised can be consulted on site in the museum. For the digital reproductions, various channels of provision are subsequently selected. Via the digital catalogue of the German National Library, the metadata and digital copies can be searched, displayed and exported in bulk. The metadata is offered under a CC-0 license, the digital copies under another Creative Commons license. In addition, the data will be imported into the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (German Digital Library) and Europeana. For indexing purposes, the digitised material is enriched with the vocabulary of the Integrated Authority File (GND). This allows searching for all materials related to individual designs and book projects, clients, publishers. For the first time, an electronically linked comprehensive catalogue of the designer's works is created. The scientific monitoring & evaluation is carried out in cooperation with the University of Erfurt, Faculty of Philosophy (Prof. Dr. Patrick Rössler). The collection is to be catalogued as true-to-life as possible for the purposes of media and design history researchers.

The project provides media and design history and contemporary designers with a significant digital collection for researching the history of book and type design in the transition from traditional to digital typography and contributes to its long-term preservation.

Results

At the end of the project, its results were presented to an professional public during a two-day symposium. The results are also documented in an edited publication.

To mark the project’s completion, the German Museum of Books and Writing has launched a virtual exhibition dedicated to the typographer Jan Tschichold. It presents small objects and unknown drafts from his estate: business cards, New Year’s greetings and labels for records. Jan Tschichold worked for numerous clients and designed many things that have remained largely unknown until now These show that even in small things, Tschichold was one of the greats.

To the virtual exhibition

More about Jan Tschichold

Project framework

Funding body

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Coordination

Dr. André Wendler

Partners

• Prof. Dr. Patrick Rössler, University of Erfurt

Duration

1 November 2019 to 31 October 2021

Costs

163.433 Euro

Contact

dbsm-info@dnb.de