The GDR as a Collector

Time and again, the language of collecting and preservation iscloaked in florid rhetoric whenever museums, their purposes andtheir holdings are evoked - even though the museum world isscarcely bound by legal definition. A closer look at the history andevolution of any institution, not least our own, quickly dispels suchillusions. This volume contrasts the bourgeois collecting ideals ofprominent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century owners withthe Marxist-Leninist notion of collecting as practised in the GDR.The research centre DIGITAL ORGANOLOGY at the Museum of MusicalInstruments, University of Leipzig, brings together an expandingpool of closely interlinked research data across multiple collections.These data provide a framework for tracing the histories of musicalinstruments and the collections to which they belong. This infrastructureis designed not only to support detailed, object-basedstudies, but also to enable large-scale analysis through distant-readingtools. The same applies to provenance research, which, with itslegal and ethical obligations, poses major challenges for universitymuseums - in organological scholarship, academic teaching, andthe wider transfer of knowledge to society.