Cataloguing and digitisation of the papers of Werner Heisenberg

The Archives of the Max Planck Society came into possession of the papers of Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) in the years 2012–2015. The papers of Werner Heisenberg are one of the most important collections of science history of the 20th century. This estate of Werner Heisenberg is of highly scientific and historical importance in general and for the history of the Leipzig University in particular. Therefore, the archives of the Max Planck Gesellschaft, the Leipzig University Library with its experience in various important digitization projects and the Institute of Physics at the University of Leipzig with its scientific expertise have decided to start a common project for deeper indexing of the entire estate of Heisenberg and the digitization of its scientific papers.The main focus of the project will be on the incorporation of the estate papers into the Kalliope Verbundkatalog (Kalliope Union Catalogue). In this context, a total of 33,353 documents will be catalogued in Kalliope. All formal data is recorded as specified in 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.Furthermore, the papers will be scanned by a service provider in accordance with the DFG guidelines for digitization. The processing is organized in a Kitodo workflow. In compliance with copyright, the scientific documents of Werner Heisenberg will then be presented on the internet using a Mirador platform.