Forum Wissen as a place of research and teaching

To live up to the claim of maintaining and providing objects related to knowledge, of making them accessible and simultaneously actively using them in research and teaching, all under one roof, it is necessary to have an infrastructure that, on the one hand, guarantees the preservation of the collections and, on the other hand, facilitates and encourages interdisciplinary work with the objects from the academic collections.

Preservation and maintenance of the collections

In line with the decentralised collection concept, most of the objects will remain at their decentralised locations. The respective institutes take care of their preservation and are supported in this by the Centre for Collection Development within the context of the central Collection Management. A central restoration workshop will be set up at Forum Wissen for this purpose.


Restoration seminar of the Arts Collection

The Central Collection Depot is also located at Forum Wissen. Here collections and sub-collections are stored for which no suitable space can be provided in their departments or which have become ?homeless? through the restructuring of departments. The items are stored here safely under optimum climatic conditions and are available in situ at any time for temporary research purposes.


Object-based research and teaching

To support the use of the collections in research and teaching, and to facilitate and encourage this in the first place, it is necessary for the objects of the collections to be digitised across the board and made accessible on a web-based platform. After all, the key to their use lies in providing scholars and researchers with access to the available materials, thus stimulating new projects and often leading beyond the parameters of a single discipline. For this purpose, a campus-wide database of the Göttingen collections is currently being established that can be used publicly via a web portal.

While the database and web portal make the collections digitally accessible and operable, Forum Wissen additionally provides the physical space and infrastructure for interdisciplinary, object-based work. The central element of this structure is the planned Object Lab, which will make it possible to bring objects from different collections together in one place for the duration of a research project or seminar and to use them for comparative work.



Plan of the Object Lab for Forum Wissen

The professorship "Materiality of Knowledge", located at Forum Wissen, and the planned doctoral degree programme of the same name will produce their own ideas for the use of the collections in research and teaching.

By linking these elements under one roof in this trendsetting way, Forum Wissen combines the preservation and provision of the collections with their active use for interdisciplinary questions, research projects and seminars. It thus performs one of the key tasks of the university, while simultaneously ensuring that the collections are permanently available for use in research and teaching.