The Renaissance of things

In a complex digitalization project, Udo Andraschke hopes to contribute towards reverting academic collections in Germany to that what they used to be: a meeting point and a place where researchers from all disciplines can share and transfer knowledge.

The heart in the CT is more than 100 years old. The object from FAU’s Anatomic Collection is scanned, and then cinematic rendering software transforms the data from the cross-sectional images into photo-realistic 3D images. “We use modern imaging procedures to digitalize selected historical specimens in this way,” explains Udo Andraschke. The focus is not only on gaining new insights into organ and tissue structures that have been invisible to date, but also on other details: Which methods were used to prepare the specimens? Have they ever been restored? What might they be able to be tell us about their history?

This is the type of information that Andraschke, who has been the curator of the FAU collections since 2011, hopes to gather about objects from a wide variety of different collections, and make available online, one step at a time. The aim of the complex and long-winded process is to revert the collections that contain a total of one million objects back to what they used to be until well into the 20th century: places for academic research, exchange and knowledge transfer. “For many decades, the collections served as workshops in the various institutes, the objects were used for teaching and research,” Andraschke explains. “Thanks to new media, but also changes in approaches, research interests and methods, interest in objects from certain subjects waned and they were often banished to the basement, attic, or wherever space could be found.  Some artifacts were just got rid of, or if we were lucky at least passed on to other institutions.”

Not only digital doubles

In 2017, FAU launched the project “Objekte im Netz” (Objects on the Net) together with the Germanische Nationalmuseum, focusing initially on six collections: the Collection of Prints and Drawings, the Medical Collection, the Paleontological Collection, the History of School Education Collection, the Pre- and Early History Collection and the Musical Instrument and Media Study Collection. “Before we started with digitalization, we sought intense dialog with experts – from the collections themselves, from the involved disciplines and from Digital Humanities,” the curator explains.  “We wanted to make a joint decision on which data to collect on which technical basis, and agree on the details of the virtual collection room and who would use it.” In the end, a platform was created that not only delivered information about the objects themselves but also gave additional details such as the location where they were found, the material they are made of, their creator and information on related objects.

The digitalization project did not start entirely from scratch: In 1996, the FAU Antique Collection was presented online already, on one of FAU’s very first websites. “That was a start,” says Udo Andraschke, who studied Literary Studies, Philosophy and the History of Medicine in Regensburg and Erlangen. “However, the online presentation was really nothing more than a digital inventory with a photo and a little information about the object.” It did make the objects more accessible to a wider public, but mainly to those people who already knew what they were looking for. According to Andraschke, “Presenting objects in this way tends to mean that the very thing that characterized academic collections gets lost: the joy of discovery, the possibility of finding things you weren’t looking for, the potential of broadening research horizons.”

A question of ethics

In spite of all the potential offered by virtual collections, they also raise questions, for example regarding ethics. That is particularly, but not only, the case with the specimens from the Anatomic Collection. “On the one hand, we are providing fascinating images of unusual objects, but at the same time we also have to define who can access them and what happens to them,” Andraschke explains. “For example, it is not in our interests for photos of deformities to be widely available online, where they could be taken in an inappropriate context, especially bearing in mind that our interests should always also be well justified.”

Misuse apart, today’s understanding of law and ethics may mean that we would have to treat sensitive objects in the collection differently than has been the case in the past, especially when you consider that they also include human specimens. What are our responsibilities vis-à-vis the people who have provided their organs? Would it possibly entail a violation of privacy rights? “Aspects of privacy and copyright law affect many areas and collections,” Andraschke explains. “For example, we have to clarify whether we are allowed to post class photos or children’s drawings from the History of School Education Collection just like that, even if they are already several decades old.”

Not an end in itself

There are approximately 1,200 academic collections in Germany alone, and roughly twenty percent of all stock has been digitalized so far. In the collaborative project “Collections, objects, data skills,” or SODa for short, Udo Andraschke will now share his expertise with other institutes of higher education. The joint project involving FAU, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, the Interessengemeinschaft für Semantische Datenverarbeitung (syndicate for semantic data processing) and the Germanisches Nationalmuseum has received nearly three million euros in funding from the German government, with approximately one million allocated to FAU. “At FAU alone, we were able to establish four new positions focusing on the one hand on the ethics of digital objects and legal issues, and on the other on the development of technical infrastructure, 2D and 3D digitalization and using technologies from machine learning,” Andraschke explains.

“Digitalization should offer an opportunity to take a new look at objects.”

Udo Andraschke

Digitalizing objects is not the only way Andraschke hopes to revive and revitalize the collections, however. “I am a passionate organizer of exhibitions,” he admits. Together with the School Museum in Nuremberg, Andraschke regularly designs special exhibitions in which objects from FAU’s History of School Education Collection play a central role. In 2025, some of the over 100 year old specimens from the Anatomic Collection in the Museum of Medical History from Ingolstadt will be on view. Together with colleagues from the relevant subjects, Andraschke is also planning to exhibit the Antique Collection and parts of the Pre- and Early History Collection in the new lecture hall complex from the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences, and Theology to make it available to a wider audience. “We want to show, both in the analog and the digital worlds, that the collections are still very much of relevance today. Digitalization should not be an end in itself, but rather an opportunity to question the real objects from a different angle, to take a new look at them, and to investigate them using other means and methods.”

For his work digitalizing the FAU collections, Udo Andraschke was awarded with FAU Innovation Prize 2024.

Author: Matthias Münch

This article is part of the FAU magazine

Innovation, diversity and passion: Those are the three guiding principles of our FAU, as stated in our mission statement. At FAU, we live these guiding principles every day in all that we do – in research, in teaching and when it comes to sharing the knowledge created at our university with society.

This, the second issue of our FAU magazine, underlines all of the above: It shows researchers who tirelessly keep pushing the boundaries of what has been believed to be possible. It introduces students who work together to achieve outstanding results for their FAU, talks about teaching staff who pass on their knowledge with infectious enthusiasm and creativity. And it reports back on members of staff with foresight and a talent for getting to the crux of the matter who are dedicated to improving the (research) infrastructure at FAU as well as people in key positions who are there for their university and are committed to its research location.