You are here: Home / Infrastructures / Res. Infrastructure
Deutsches Museum (DM)
Identification
Hosting Legal Entity
German Museum
Address:
Museumsinsel 1, Deutsches Museum, Munich, PO: 80538 (Germany)
Location
Museumsinsel 1, Deutsches Museum, Munich, PO: 80538 (Germany)
Structure
Type Of RI
Distributed
Coordinating Country
Germany
Status
Status
Current Status:
Operational since 1903
Timeline
Being upgraded since 2010 to 2025
Scientific Description
The Deutsches Museum was founded in Munich in 1903 and today covers an area of 73 000 square metres consisting of some 50 exhibition areas dealing with science and technology. It is the most frequented museum in Germany and its goal is to make science and technology accessible to visitors in an understandable way. In addition to the main building on the Museumsinsel, the museum has three branch museums – the Flugwerft Schleissheim, the new Verkehrszentrum on the Theresienhöhe, and the Deutsches Museum Bonn.

RI Keywords
Museum, Science, Collections, Archives, Exhibition, Library, History, Research, Technology
Classifications
RI Category
Data Archives, Data Repositories and Collections
Research Archives
Research Libraries
Repositories
Reference material repositories
Telescopes
Collections
Scientific Domain
Social Sciences
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Humanities and Arts
Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics and Mathematics
Biological and Medical Sciences
Chemistry and Material Sciences
ESFRI Domain
Social and Cultural Innovation
Services
Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology

Research into the history of science and technology is one of the central statutory tasks of the Deutsches Museum. It is determined on one hand by the museum’s collecting and exhibiting activities and, on the other, by the research interests of its cooperation partners at the Munich Centre for the History of Science and Technology (MZWTG). The academic staff at the museum’s own Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology combine these two orientations in their onging research projects.

Scholar-in-Residence Program

The Deutsches Museum in Munich has several attractive scholarships to offer research scholars interested in working for six or 12 months on projects involving the museum's vast and heterogeneous collections. The scholarship programme is international and interdisciplinary in scope.

Archives

The Deutsches Museum Archives is one of Europe’s most important archives specializing in the history of science and technology. Altogether it has some 4500m of shelving holding source documents and other archive material on this subject. Particular points of emphasis are transport and aerospace, computing, and the history of physics and chemistry.

Scientific Collection

The Deutsches Museum possesses over 100 000 objects from the fields of science and technology. The large number of valuable original exhibits makes the Deutsches Museum one of the most important museums of science and technology anywhere in the world. The collections are not restricted to any specialized range of topics: they include objects from mining to atomic physics, from the Altamira cave to a magnified model of a human cell. They extend from the Stone Age to the present time. Collecting historically significant objects is still one of the Museum’s central tasks, so the stock is constantly growing.

Library

The Deutsches Museum library is intended primarily as a research library for the history of science and technology. It is also useful for anyone interested in science and technology. The library is open to the public at no charge. This means that nearly 925 000 volumes are available for consultation at all times. 25000 of them are systematically arranged on the shelves of the reading room, where some 1600 current periodicals are also laid out for perusal.

Equipment
Observatory

The Zeiss refractor in the western dome was designed and built for the Deutsches Museum by the Carl Zeiss optics manufacturer in 1924/25. Today the dome and the Zeiss refractor are again in perfect condition. The eastern dome features a Goerz reflecting telescope. In 2009 it was refurbished and restored in Jena. The eastern dome was renovated in 2011.

TUMLab

The TUMLab is a laboratory for pupils and teachers operated by Technische Universität Munich. In the robotics course, teenagers build Lego robots by themselves and learn how to programme them. The astronomy courses give pupils a chance to build telescopes, use the computer planetarium to learn how to navigate by the stars and planets, and process photos from the Hubble space telescope. Other offerings relate to such areas as automation technology, chemistry, music and physics.

Collaborations
Networks
Munich Center for the History of Science and Technology
TUM School of Education
Rachel Carson Center
Date of last update: 18/09/2017
Printable version