The scientific indexing of the Oberharzer Bergamtsprotokolle. Archival tradition of early modern mining administration, state management and technical development in the European mining industry (mid 17th to mid 19th century)

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With the Bergamtsprotokolle the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv (NLA) has in its branch office Bergarchiv Clausthal-Zellerfeld an extensive stock of sources of extraordinary historical importance. For the period from the middle of the 17th century to about 1850 over a period of almost 200 years, it comprises the almost complete transmission of minutes of the weekly meetings of the senior mountain officials in the Harz mining district. The protocols contain detailed reports on the conditions of the numerous operations and a wide range of information on all essential aspects of the mining industry. They form an extremely valuable fund for the administrative practice of the early modern state, the state of scientific and technical knowledge of the time and the development of the early modern mining industry in the Harz region. They also extend far beyond this to the centres of pre- and early industrial European ore mining, with which the Harz region, one of the most important mining regions at the time, was in active exchange relations.The project aims at the scientific indexing of the extensive stock of protocol books (614 volumes) of the Upper Harz administration and uses the standards of current archival indexing technology. With the help of the NLA's web-based archive information system 'Arcinsys', the diverse information from this thematically complex source is made accessible, processed and immediately available for research. This method offers a model for the cataloguing of further serial sources in the NLA, which show analogies to the Bergamtsprotokolle and distinguished the state economic management of the Guelph territories in early modern history (e.g. chamber and court registers).The Oberharzer Bergamtsprotokolle form a unique, from the genre of the Amtsbücher outstanding source corpus of European rank. Its systematic indexing provides exemplary insights into the company organization and the sciene of early modern mining, but it can also provide new research impulses beyond the history of mining.