Von Manuskripten und Druckwerken: die wissenschaftliche Redaktion des Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseums

Abstract

Since research got underway at the German Maritime Museum in 1971, this institution has been publishing the research results (including numerous dissertations), primarily of external scientists, in its series Schriften des Deutschen Schiffahrtsmuseums. A closely interlocked relationship with external research was thus achieved and further intensified in 1975 by the establishment of the scientific editorial department and the publishing of the Deutsches Schiffahrtsarchiv. Written material concerning the exhibitions and the general museum work are conveyed to a broader public in the form of museum guides, brochures and the semi-annual journal Deutsche Schiffahrt, published by the endowment association. The series of scientific treatises, which has grown to comprise nearly sixty volumes, is produced according to high standards of quality. This circumstance and the annual publication of the scientific journal in the form of a yearbook since 1980 were essential factors leading to the inscription of the German Maritime Museum on the Blue List of institutions receiving joint federal and state funding, as well as to its status as a national museum and its excellent international reputation. In the 1990s the museum’s publication programme was enhanced by a documentary series, in which above all first-hand reports from the realm of navigation are published at varying intervals. The editorial department, which now has a staff of three, also oversees publications appearing independently of the various museum series. All in all, the editorial activities have become continually more complex - with regard to contents and conception alike - in the course of the past thirty years, while being compelled to respond to increasingly rapid technical developments. Audio books are already being produced, for example, and the first online publications are presently in the preparation stage. The increasing technicalisation of production processes has led, however, to an enormous rise in production costs, taking place at a rate which cannot easily be compensated. In view of the fact that, in this day and age, the value of scientific work is often measured primarily according to its cost/benefit ratio, the editorial department has thus come under considerable financial pressure. What is more, it is confronted with new tasks, tasks of a kind that could never have been foreseen in 1971, when Detlev Ellmers provided the impulse for the publication of a regularly appearing scientific monograph series.