prussia museum digital
In spite of war losses, numerous archival documents and archaeological finds, the results of more than 150 years of research in East Prussia, are still preserved. At present, these artefacts from the former Prussia Museum in Königsberg are scattered all over Europe, and thus taken out of their scientific contexts, together with the related information. A central task for the project ›Continuity of Research and Research of Continuity‹ is therefore to restore this network of information within a virtual setting. For this purpose, an extensive database (easydb) titled ›prussia museum digital‹ has been developed in cooperation with Programmfabrik (Berlin).
Greater parts of the Königsberg collections are now kept in Berlin, Kaliningrad/Königsberg in Russia and Olsztyn/Allenstein in Poland. As a first step, the items deposited in the Museum for Pre- and Early History in Berlin were digitalized between 2012 and 2014. Parallel to this, a database tailored to the specific requirements of the project was developed, providing access to scientific information related to East Prussian pre-war archive material and finds. Our objective is to adequately manage this comprehensive corpus and make it available for archaeological and cultural-historical research via an online portal.
›prussia museum digital‹ is available since May 2021. Colleagues and interested users can get a personalized access to view and research initial results and extensive archive and finds holdings of the Prussia Museum in Königsberg. These include, for example, a thesaurus of archaeological findplaces in East Prussia as well as more than 20,000 sheets of archival documentation and around 18,000 archaeological finds. The database will be continuously expanded in the coming years with additional sources and new scientific results. The link to ›prussia museum digital‹ can be found here: