Insights into the museum archive

Around a century after the imperial collections moved into the Imperial and Royal Court Museum of Art History, which opened in 1891, a separate museum archive was set up in the mid-1980s. From the outset, the archive's task was to collect and process historically relevant documents and artefacts that were or could be of interest to the museum's history and make them accessible to researchers. The lecture provides an insight into the history and holdings of the archive, outlines the varied day-to-day work in the museum archive and concludes with two very different projects to illustrate the benefits of a systematic and intensive examination of historical sources.