Joachim Raff archive online

Today, posting and sharing online is done in no time at all. It is a different matter to populate the Internet with meaningful content and make it usable with today's technological possibilities. This is exactly what the Joachim Raff Archive in Lachen does. On December 10, the archive premises on the upper shores of Lake Zurich opened the portal.raff-archiv.ch presented. Since autumn 2018, Joachim Raff's (1822-1882) birthplace has been home to the most comprehensive center of expertise on the life and work of the composer, who also grew up in Lachen. The existing holdings are constantly being added to and have been systematized and recorded from the outset in such a way that the resulting data sets are suitable for online presentation. Around 350 works, 2300 postal items, 1350 people and 150 institutions related to Raff are now available in the beta version.

Today, there are publicly accessible standards according to which continuous texts are categorized in such a way that they become machine-readable and can be automatically linked to other texts. The more material is networked in this way, the more diverse and surprising the insights that result. The portal thus becomes a kind of super-brain that always has all content available and links everything with everything else. In the humanities, work with coding systems is referred to as "digital humanities", to put it simply. It offers almost inexhaustible potential in terms of exploring the connections between figures, works and institutions. The project team felt that Raff was an ideal starting point for the creation of such a database, as he had a huge network at his disposal, which is very well documented in thousands of letters and other documents that have been systematically collected by the Raff Society for many years.

At the press conference, Res Marty, President of the Joachim Raff Society, called it a historic day. He expressed his sincere thanks to the academic team who had brought this project so far in such a short time with a great deal of passion and hard work and in the best of German-Swiss cooperation: In addition to Severin Kolb, head of the Joachim Raff Archive in Lachen, the team includes Stefan König and Dennis Ried, both from the Max Reger Institute in Karlsruhe and the latter responsible for research data management at the Raff Portal. Nick Pfefferkorn, head of the publishing house Breitkopf & Härtel, with whom the Raff Archive works closely and who joined us towards the end of the press conference, summed it up in a nutshell: the project is a pioneering achievement.