Hidden treasures are revealed
28 Aug 2026
Delighted by the expansion of the digitization project (from right): Paolo Criscuolo (Digital Services staff member at HLSB), Frederik Stey (Head of Digital Services at HLSB), Dr. Frank Verse (Museum Director), and Christine Oberholz (Collections Director, Vonderau Museum). They are holding several exhibits from the museum’s storage.
Making valuable historical stocks publicly accessible via digital means – that is the central aim of the ‘FulDig’ project run by the University, State and Public Library (HLSB). The project is now expanding further through a new cooperation with the Vonderau Museum in Fulda: museum treasures that would otherwise mostly lie dormant in storage are thus being made visible and accessible.
For 16 years now, valuable historical stocks have been made publicly accessible via the University, State and Public Library’s (HLSB) digitisation server under the name ‘FulDig’ – including certificates, prints from the 16th to the 18th centuries and regional newspapers. In 2023, a cooperation agreement between the Fulda University of Applied Sciences and the City of Fulda added another important element: since then, large sections of the historical stock of the Fulda City Archives have also been digitised and made available on FulDig. In recent years, for example, numerous historical municipal accounts and the significant ‘Judenschaft’ stock have been made available to the public for the first time. FulDig has thus long since become one of the most important research tools for academics and the interested public.
Now another partner is joining the initiative: the municipal Vonderau Museum will also be contributing to the digital provision of its collections in future. Initial discussions on this took place as early as 2025 under the then Head of the Cultural Affairs Office, Dr Thomas Heiler, who had initiated the cooperation. The relevant contract has now been signed, and the first digitised items are expected to be publicly accessible by the end of the year.
The cooperation focuses on the aim of making visible, in particular, those objects that have hitherto been stored mainly in the museum’s storerooms and were therefore not accessible to the public.
The first 60 or so digitised objects are dedicated to Fulda’s industrial history as part of an ongoing funded project. These include recently acquired stocks from the Nicolaus Weber and Goodyear factories, which have since closed, as well as older stocks from an earlier phase of Fulda’s industrialisation. The collection offers information on the objects and accompanying research, as well as a number of 3D digitalised models, which provide a complete, 360-degree view of the objects and thus open up valuable new insights for research.
