Netherlands Institute for Art History
The Netherlands Institute for Art History or RKD is located in The Hague and is home to the largest art history center in the world. The center specializes in documentation and books on Western art from the late Middle Ages until modern times. All of this is open to the public, much of it has been digitized and is available on their website; the main goal of the bureau is to collect and make art research available, most notably in the field of Dutch Masters. Via the available databases, the visitor can gain insight into archival evidence on the lives of many artists of past centuries; the library owns 450,000 titles, of which ca. 150,000 are auction catalogs. There are ca. 3,000 magazines, of which 600 are running subscriptions. Though most of the text is in Dutch, the standard record format includes a link to library entries and images of known works, which include English as well as Dutch titles; the RKD manages the Dutch version of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, a thesaurus of terms for management of information on art and architecture.
The original version is an initiative of the Getty Research Institute in California. The collection was started through bequests by Frits Lugt, art historian and owner of a massive collection of drawings and prints, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, a collector, art historian and museum curator, their bequest formed the basis for both the art collection and the library, now housed in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. Though not all of the library's holdings have been digitised, much of its metadata is accessible online; the website itself is available in both an English user interface. In the artist database RKDartists, each artist is assigned a record number. To reference an artist page directly, use the code listed at the bottom of the record of the form: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/ followed by the artist's record number. For example, the artist record number for Salvador Dalí is 19752, so his RKD artist page can be referenced. In the images database RKDimages, each artwork is assigned a record number.
To reference an artwork page directly, use the code listed at the bottom of the record of the form: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/ followed by the artwork's record number. For example, the artwork record number for The Night Watch is 3063, so its RKD artwork page can be referenced; the Art and Architecture Thesaurus assigns a record for each term, but these can not be referenced online by record number. Rather, they are used in the databases and the databases can be searched for terms. For example, the painting called "The Night Watch" is a militia painting, all records fitting this keyword can be seen by selecting this from the image screen; the thesaurus is a set of general terms, but the RKD contains a database for an alternate form of describing artworks, that today is filled with biblical references. This is the iconclass database. To see all images that depict Miriam's dance, the associated iconclass code 71E1232 can be used as a special search term. Official website Direct link to the databases The Dutch version of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus
National Library of the Czech Republic
The National Library of the Czech Republic is the central library of the Czech Republic. It is directed by the Ministry of Culture; the library's main building is located in the historical Clementinum building in Prague, where half of its books are kept. The other half of the collection is stored in the district of Hostivař; the National Library is the biggest library in the Czech Republic, in its funds there are around 6 million documents. The library has around 60,000 registered readers; as well as Czech texts, the library stores older material from Turkey and India. The library houses books for Charles University in Prague; the library won international recognition in 2005 as it received the inaugural Jikji Prize from UNESCO via the Memory of the World Programme for its efforts in digitising old texts. The project, which commenced in 1992, involved the digitisation of 1,700 documents in its first 13 years; the most precious medieval manuscripts preserved in the National Library are the Codex Vyssegradensis and the Passional of Abbes Kunigunde.
In 2006 the Czech parliament approved funding for the construction of a new library building on Letna plain, between Hradčanská metro station and Sparta Prague's football ground, Letná stadium. In March 2007, following a request for tender, Czech architect Jan Kaplický was selected by a jury to undertake the project, with a projected completion date of 2011. In 2007 the project was delayed following objections regarding its proposed location from government officials including Prague Mayor Pavel Bém and President Václav Klaus. Plans for the building had still not been decided in February 2008, with the matter being referred to the Office for the Protection of Competition in order to determine if the tender had been won fairly. In 2008, Minister of Culture Václav Jehlička announced the end of the project, following a ruling from the European Commission that the tender process had not been carried out legally; the library was affected by the 2002 European floods, with some documents moved to upper levels to avoid the excess water.
Over 4,000 books were removed from the library in July 2011 following flooding in parts of the main building. There was a fire at the library in December 2012. List of national and state libraries Official website
The Seven Swabians
The Seven Swabians is a German fairy tale, collected by The Brothers Grimm in the second volume edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen under the number KHM119. The term Swabians refers to people from the German region Swabia, though in Switzerland it refers to Germans in general. Once upon a time there were Seven Swabians. To be safe from danger they carried one long spear with them. One day in July they walk through a meadow just by notice a hornet buzzing by. Unaware what they just heard the men start to panic, thinking it was a war drum. One of them tries to flee, jumps over a fence and walks right on the teeth of a rake, whereupon the handle hits him in the face, he begs for mercy and tells the invisible attacker that he'll surrender, whereupon his six friends do the same. When they understand they were fooled they decide to keep this embarrassing anecdote a secret. To prevent the story from getting out they swear to not say anything about it until one of them should accidentally open his mouth.
They encounter a hare sleeping in the sun. They decide to attack it. After bracing themselves with all the courage they can get they strike out and the hare runs away, whereupon they realize they've once again been fooled; the septet travels onward. Unaware how to cross it they ask a man on the opposite side of the river for help. Due to the distance and their language the man doesn't understand what they were saying and he asked them in the dialect of Trier: "Wat, Wat?" This causes the men to think. As the first Swabian gets into the river he starts to sink into the mud, his hat is blown away to the opposite shore, next to a frog who croaks noises that sound like "wat, wat". The six surviving Swabians think. Hans Wilhelm Kirchhof was the first to write it down in his book Wendemut. Eucharius Eyring wrote it down as a poem in "Proverbiorum Copia". Ludwig Aurbacher wrote down a well known version in "Ein Volksbüchlein" and gave the seven protagonists names: Allgäuer, Nestelschwaub, Spiegelschwaub, Gelbfüssler and Knöpfleschwaub.
In 1756 German preacher Sebastian Sailer wrote the tale down as a comedy. Both Ferdinand Fellner and Georg Mühlberg are well known German artists who made illustrations to the story. In 1545 the story was adapted into song by Hans Sachs. In 1887 Karl Millöcker adapted the story into an operette. During World War I the Fokker D. VII of the Luftstreitkräfte's Jasta 65 fighter squadron, flown by Gefreiter Wilhelm Scheutzel was resplendent in a scheme depicting a scene from an ancient German fable brought back to popularity by the Brothers Grimm in 1857. There is no other aircraft, but his Fokker D. VII has the'Sieben Schwaben' depicted in battle with a hare, using their one shared, pike-like spear. According to the tale, the men had mistaken the animal for a Dragon; the story is an olden day'blonde joke' about the people of Swabia and is thought to have been told by those in neighbouring areas of Germany as a tongue-in-cheek insult to the region. Scheutzel lasted until the end of the war, he scored his one and only kill when he downed a DH4 on 13 August 1918.
Why Scheutzel had this scene depicted on his aircraft is not clear. Was the art an ironic comment on the folly of war, an insult to the Allies that they would flee like rabbits or Scheutzel liked the war cry given by the leader of the Seven Schwaben in his attack on the rabbit: "then let us boldly advance to the fight, thus we shall show our valour and might"? In 1978 a monument was created on the Fehrbelliner Platz in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, sculpted by Hans-Georg Damm. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm119.html
Integrated Authority File
The Integrated Authority File or GND is an international authority file for the organisation of personal names, subject headings and corporate bodies from catalogues. It is used for documentation in libraries and also by archives and museums; the GND is managed by the German National Library in cooperation with various regional library networks in German-speaking Europe and other partners. The GND falls under the Creative Commons Zero licence; the GND specification provides a hierarchy of high-level entities and sub-classes, useful in library classification, an approach to unambiguous identification of single elements. It comprises an ontology intended for knowledge representation in the semantic web, available in the RDF format; the Integrated Authority File became operational in April 2012 and integrates the content of the following authority files, which have since been discontinued: Name Authority File Corporate Bodies Authority File Subject Headings Authority File Uniform Title File of the Deutsches Musikarchiv At the time of its introduction on 5 April 2012, the GND held 9,493,860 files, including 2,650,000 personalised names.
There are seven main types of GND entities: LIBRIS Virtual International Authority File Information pages about the GND from the German National Library Search via OGND Bereitstellung des ersten GND-Grundbestandes DNB, 19 April 2012 From Authority Control to Linked Authority Data Presentation given by Reinhold Heuvelmann to the ALA MARC Formats Interest Group, June 2012
Germany
Germany the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north and the Czech Republic to the east and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to the west. Germany includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,386 square kilometres, has a temperate seasonal climate. With 83 million inhabitants, it is the second most populous state of Europe after Russia, the most populous state lying in Europe, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is a decentralized country, its capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while Frankfurt serves as its financial capital and has the country's busiest airport. Germany's largest urban area is the Ruhr, with its main centres of Essen; the country's other major cities are Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bremen and Nuremberg. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity.
A region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation was formed in 1815; the German revolutions of 1848–49 resulted in the Frankfurt Parliament establishing major democratic rights. In 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the revolution of 1918–19, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic; the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to the establishment of a dictatorship, the annexation of Austria, World War II, the Holocaust. After the end of World War II in Europe and a period of Allied occupation, Austria was re-established as an independent country and two new German states were founded: West Germany, formed from the American and French occupation zones, East Germany, formed from the Soviet occupation zone.
Following the Revolutions of 1989 that ended communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the country was reunified on 3 October 1990. Today, the sovereign state of Germany is a federal parliamentary republic led by a chancellor, it is a great power with a strong economy. As a global leader in several industrial and technological sectors, it is both the world's third-largest exporter and importer of goods; as a developed country with a high standard of living, it upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection, a tuition-free university education. The Federal Republic of Germany was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957 and the European Union in 1993, it is part of the Schengen Area and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G7, the G20, the OECD. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential and successful artists, musicians, film people, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.
Germany has a large number of World Heritage sites and is among the top tourism destinations in the world. The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine; the German term Deutschland diutisciu land is derived from deutsch, descended from Old High German diutisc "popular" used to distinguish the language of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz "popular", derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people", from which the word Teutons originates; the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a coal mine in Schöningen between 1994 and 1998 where eight 380,000-year-old wooden javelins of 1.82 to 2.25 m length were unearthed. The Neander Valley was the location where the first non-modern human fossil was discovered.
The Neanderthal 1 fossils are known to be 40,000 years old. Evidence of modern humans dated, has been found in caves in the Swabian Jura near Ulm; the finds included 42,000-year-old bird bone and mammoth ivory flutes which are the oldest musical instruments found, the 40,000-year-old Ice Age Lion Man, the oldest uncontested figurative art discovered, the 35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest uncontested human figurative art discovered. The Nebra sky disk is a bronze artefact created during the European Bronze Age attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, it is part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south and west from the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well
Wilhelm Hauff
Wilhelm Hauff was a Württembergian poet and novelist. Hauff was born in Stuttgart, the son of August Friedrich Hauff, a secretary in the Württemberg ministry of foreign affairs, Hedwig Wilhelmine Elsaesser Hauff, he was the second of four children. Young Hauff lost his father when he was seven years old, his early education was self-gained in the library of his maternal grandfather at Tübingen, where his mother had moved after the death of her husband. In 1818 he was sent to the Klosterschule at Blaubeuren, in 1820 began to study at the University of Tübingen. In four years he completed his theological studies at the Tübinger Stift. On leaving the university, Hauff became tutor to the children of the Württemberg minister of war, General Baron Ernst Eugen von Hugel, for them wrote his Märchen, which he published in his Märchen almanach auf das Jahr 1826; some of these stories are popular in German-speaking countries to this day, such as Der kleine Muck, Kalif Storch and Die Geschichte von dem Gespensterschiff —all set in the Orient.
While there, he wrote the first part of the Mitteilungen aus den Memoiren des Satan and Der Mann im Mond. The latter, a parody of the sentimental and sensual novels of Heinrich Clauren, became in the course of composition, a close imitation of that author's style and was published under his name; as a result, Clauren brought and won an action for damages against Hauff, whereupon Hauff followed up the attack in his witty and sarcastic Kontroverspredigt über H. Clauren und den Mann im Mond and attained his original object: the moral annihilation of the mawkish and unhealthy literature with which Clauren was flooding the country. Meanwhile, inspired by Sir Walter Scott's novels, Hauff wrote the historical romance Lichtenstein: Romantische Sage aus der wuerttembergischen Geschichte, which became hugely popular in Germany and in Swabia, treating as it did the most interesting period in the history of that country, the reign of Duke Ulrich; this novel was the inspiration for Duke Ulrich's heir, Duke Wilhelm of Urach, to rebuild the castle, which had fallen into disrepair, in accordance with Hauff's description.
While on a journey to France, the Netherlands, northern Germany he wrote the second part of the Memoiren des Satan and some short novels, among them the charming Die Bettlerin vom Pont des Arts and his masterpiece, the novella Phantasien im Bremer Ratskeller. He published some short poems, which have passed into Volkslieder, among them "Morgenrot, leuchtest mir zum frühen Tod?" and "Steh ich in finstrer Mitternacht". The novella Jud Süß was published in 1827. In January 1827, Hauff undertook the editorship of the Stuttgart Morgenblatt and in the following month married his cousin Luise Hauff, but his happiness was prematurely cut short by his death from fever on 18 November 1827, his Sämtliche Werke, with a biography, edited by Gustav Schwab were published in 3 volumes 1830–1834, 5 volumes in 1882. They were published by Felix Bobertag 1891–1897. A selection from his works was published by M. Mendheim. Considering his brief life, Hauff was an extraordinarily prolific writer; the freshness and originality of his talent, his inventiveness, his genial humour have won him a high place among the southern German prose writers of the early nineteenth century.
Little Longnose, a 2003 Russian animated feature based on one of his stories. Geschichte vom kleinen Muck, a 1953 film. Das kalte feature film, 1950, East Germany, director Paul Verhoeven. Сказка, рассказанная ночью, Soviet feature film based on the stories The Marble Heart and The Spessart Inn, USSR, 1981. Халиф - аист, Soviet animation, based on one of the stories, 1981. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed.. "Hauff, Wilhelm". Encyclopædia Britannica. Cambridge University Press.. This work in turn cites: Julius Klaiber, Wilhelm Hauff, ein Lebensbild Max Mendheim, Hauffs Leben und Werke Hans Hofmann, W. Hauff Works by Wilhelm Hauff at Project Gutenberg Works by or about Wilhelm Hauff at Internet Archive Works by Wilhelm Hauff at LibriVox Collection of W. Hauff's Fairy Tales Collection of links with commentary Many fairy tales available Overview of Hauff with many of his texts online Steh ich in finstrer Mitternacht Reiters Morgenlied Wilhelm Hauff at Library of Congress Authorities, with 153 catalogue records
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
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