Jan Tschichold is one of the most significant book and type designers of the 20th century. He worked adjacently to the Bauhaus and had a major influence on typography after the Second World War. Since 2006, his estate has been located at the German Museum of Books and Writing, which is at the German National Library in Leipzig. A digitisation project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has made it possible to put Tschichold’s estate online, rendering it freely available worldwide. The project pursued four goals: (1) digitising the estate, (2) making it open access, (3) unlocking its potential with linked data and (4) guiding the process academically. The parts of the estate selected for digitisation are legally permitted to be published online. The parts that have not been digitised can be consulted in person at the museum. Consequently, an electronically indexed directory of the designer’s work now exists for the first time.
Since numerous other European institutions in addition to the German Museum of Books and Writing have parts of Tschichold’s material legacy in their archives, librarians and archivists from Germany, Switzerland and the UK are meeting for the first time to inspect Tschichold’s oeuvre together. The international symposium for the conclusion of the digitisation project took place on 15 and 16 September 2021 at the German Museum of Books and Writing. Themed “Digital material. Digitized collections in cultural heritage institutions. Conference on the curating and analyzing of digitized collections using the example of Jan Tschichold’s Estate”, it was held on-site and virtually in English.
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