German Museum
|
|
Address:
|
Museumsinsel 1, Deutsches Museum, Munich, PO: 80538 (Germany)
|
Research Archives
Research Libraries
Repositories
Reference material repositories
Telescopes
Collections
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Humanities and Arts
Physics, Astronomy, Astrophysics and Mathematics
Biological and Medical Sciences
Chemistry and Material Sciences
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.