Indexing of the estates within the Tanzarchiv Leipzig and digitization of the estate of Rudolf von Laban

In 2011 the Leipzig University Library assumed responsibility for the collections of the Leipzig Dance Archives (Tanzarchiv Leipzig). The Dance Archives’ holdings were moved to the University Library, where they have been reorganised. Since 2011 the University Library has been working on indexing of the Dance Archives. The project described in our application shall support this aim. As a former Institute of “The Academy of Arts” (Institut der Akademie der Künste) of the GDR, the Leipzig Dance Archives represent the foremost documentation center for dance history and contemporary dance in the states of the former East Germany. The primary aim of the project is the incorporation of the estate and archival collections of the Leipzig Dance Archives into the Kalliope Verbundkatalog (Kalliope Union Catalog). In this context a total of 47,057 documents shall be catalogued in Kalliope. All formal data shall be recorded as specified in the cataloguing model of the “Rules for the Cataloguing of Estates and Autographs”. This process will involve not only formal cataloguing, but also the description of the documents’ contents and the repackaging and signing of the holdings.

Along with the cataloguing of the estate of the Leipzig Dance Archives, the University Library plans to digitize the documents of the dancer and choreographer Rudolf Laban and make this information available on the Internet. The papers of Rudolf Laban are the most important part of the collection of the Dance Archives. The papers shall be scanned and processed in a Kitodo workflow at the in-house digitization lab in accordance with the DFG guidelines for digitization. A modern Mirador platform shall be used for the online presentation.