Cataloguing and providing digitized historical pharmacy questionnaires and correspondence of the Vester Archives, 1925-55

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The Vester Archives for the History of Pharmacies of Dr. Helmut Vester (1913-2001) is an outstanding resource for studying history and networks of the well-educated, middle-class group of pharmacists. It consists on comprehensive survey responses and an extensive collection of related data. The standardized questionnaire of the first survey, conducted in 1925/26, related to the history of pharmacies (name, establishment, location, ownership, etc.). The second survey, conducted in the 1940s/50s, included an additional standardized questionnaire regarding biographical data (education, employment, etc.). The collection of related data from pharmaceutical press clippings, pharmacy directories, or secondary literature, is ranging from 1865 to 1985. The collection is indexed by 500,000 catalog cards, sorted biographically and topographically. The project is aiming at recording the metadata about the 8.000 survey responses and the questionnaire data about pharmacies (corporate bodies) and pharmacists (persons). For encoding both metadata and historical/biographical data, the project will make use of the data infrastructure of the Kalliope Union Catalog, a cataloging service for archival resources like personal paper and manuscript collections. It is based on standards for both types of data and contributes to the Integrated Authority File of the German National Library. Moreover, digitized questionnaires with enclosures and index cards will be provided online.As a result of the project, data from the questionnaires including related correspondence and evidence will be available online. It will significantly add and complement records about authors or correspondents who were pharmacists maintained by the Integrated Authority File, and thus support reuse of data by libraries and archives. Ambiguous or incomplete data of questionnaires will be partly supplemented by information available through the collection of related sources, particularly names and dates (living dates, establishment). The pharmaceutical profession has eminently been affected by scientific, economic, and political changes in the 19th and 20th century. This unique inventory provides not only biographical data of pharmacist families – an educational elite, from which famous scientists, industrialists, creatives, or patrons have emerged – but the data also support research on pharmaceutical, economic or urban history. With the standardized data encoding capabilities of the Kalliope Union Catalog the data will be thus also available for future research projects relying especially on statistics and network analysis.