Pictures from the past

Would you like to see Franz Josef Strauß’s visit to the university in 1986 (DocK 750)? What did the campus look like in the 1970s, when a narrow-gauge railway line still crossed the grounds instead of the ‘Unihighway’ (DocK 92)? And are you familiar with the photograph in which all four vice-chancellors in the university’s history pose together (Doc. No. 1416)?

As of recently, images spanning decades of the University of Bayreuth’s history are freely available for everyone to research, explore and discuss. The University of Bayreuth Archives thus provide previously unknown insights and form the launch project for the university’s own portal, Collection@UBT, which is managed by the Research Data Management team led by Dr Thomas Martin (for enquiries: collections@uni-bayreuth.de). In addition to the archive holdings, the portal provides access to multimedia project and estate collections from researchers and institutions, and the range of resources on offer is constantly growing.

The Bayreuth University Archives had accumulated photographs in various formats: slides, negatives, colour prints, black-and-white prints, positives of numerous sizes, CDs or floppy discs containing digital images, some of which overlapped and, given their sheer volume, were impossible to make sense of. As part of the university’s 50th anniversary celebrations, the images were reviewed, assessed, subjected to legal scrutiny and preserved for the long term. To this end, all analogue images were digitised in-house and merged with the originally digitally created UBT images in the photo collection (reference AUBT DokK). This collection now comprises almost 3,000 digital images spanning the period from 1975 to the 2000s. In doing so, the University of Bayreuth has made a conscious decision to adopt a modern approach to research data and to engage in dialogue with contemporary witnesses, regional experts and interested members of the public. Please feel free to have a look. And if you have any background information on individual images, we would be delighted to hear from you.

Link to the photo gallery AUBT DokK: https://collections.uni-bayreuth.de/aubt/home.