Digitisation / Cataloguing of non-textual objects: Human skeletal collections. Development of Standards for the access to historical anthropological / anatomical research collections using the Freiburg Alexander Ecker collection as example

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Research collections of human skeletons from historical contexts exist at universities, museums and institutions concerned with the preservation of cultural heritage. The collections are of value to the history of science. As well they provide valuable research infrastructures for the anthropological reconstruction of biodiversity in prehistory and forensics and are used as reference samples in the development and test of osteological methods. There is a certain consensus in anthropology which methods are adequate for assessing a conventional set of biological traits on the skeleton. This, however, does not extend to data documentation or modern methodical approaches. The proposed project draws on the Alexander Ecker Skeletal Collection, kept at the Uniseum Freiburg, to develop a catalogue of data items referring to the anthropological material and its curation. This scheme will take the form of a standardised codebook for data collection. Data will be organised in a dynamic open-source database system which allows for later extensions to include additional research results and new digital data representations. The database structure will be flexible enough to connect to supraregional databases and enable the exchange of data, even between other local databases with diverging semantics. This will be performed in close collaboration with other institutions holding historical human skeletal collections.