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Press release
Inaugural Lecture by Prof. Dr. Felix Sch?fer
On the occasion of his appointment as part-time professor for "Digitisation of Archives and Collections" at the Department of Information Science, Prof. Dr. Felix Sch?fer will give his inaugural lecture on the 29th of January 2024 entitled "What do we do with 1 million scans? Or: Open GLAMour at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation!"
With its many museums, libraries, archives and research institutes spread across five different organisational institutions, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin (SPK) is one of the largest cultural institutions in the world. Its countless historical collections and holdings document the cultural development of mankind from its beginnings to the present day. Digitisation has played a central role in the SPK's core tasks – the cataloguing, preservation, research, presentation and communication of these treasures – for many years. Digital images, audio and video files, 3D scans, virtual exhibitions, online offerings, data-related services and much more are being created in all areas.
In his inaugural lecture, Felix Sch?fer, who works full-time at the SPK in the Chief Information Officer's department, will give an insight into this ever-expanding digital cosmos and describe the various activities being undertaken to make this data more accessible to the general public in a better, more innovative, more participatory and more experimental way.
About the person
Felix Sch?fer studied Classical Archaeology, Ancient History and Computer Science at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universit?t Freiburg, the University of Oxford (UK) and the University of Cologne, where he completed his doctorate on a topic related to ancient Roman architectural history. He was then a research assistant at the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne and at the same time responsible for the development of the excavation documentation system idai.field at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) in Berlin.
From September 2011 to December 2017, he designed and coordinated the development of "IANUS. Research Data Centre Archaeology & Classical Studies", a national discipline-specific research data infrastructure with a focus on data management and digital long-term archiving. From January 2018 to December 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin as part of the research programme "History of the Max Planck Society (GMPG)". During this time, he was responsible for the project, quality and data management of the mass digitisation of archives and files of the Max Planck Society (MPG) in Berlin and Munich. From January 2021 to August 2021, as part of a cooperation between the GMPG project and the Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung (GWDG) in G?ttingen, he investigated legal, technical and organisational issues relating to the sustainable archiving, dissemination and subsequent use of the research data and the virtual research environment of the GMPG project after its end in 2022.
Since June 2021, he has been working at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) in Berlin and is responsible for setting up the "SPK Lab", a data laboratory for sharing, reusing and experimenting with the diverse data treasures of the museums, archives and libraries that are part of these cultural institutions. He is also involved in several open science activities, an open access repository for SPK multimedia content and the NFDI4objects consortium.
Felix Sch?fer has been a professor at the FH Potsdam since 2023.
Inaugural lecture
When: 29/01/2024, 6.00 pm
Where: House D / 011
Online: https://fh-potsdam.zoom-x.de/j/66672135880?pwd=L2FSWnB6enFoSTF3dEFpazRDNXM1dz09
Meeting ID: 666 7213 5880
Identification code: 60405897
The inaugural lecture is open to the public, will take place on site and will be broadcast live in parallel. Interested parties are welcome. Following the lecture, there will be a small reception in the foyer of House D.