The collaborative project THIMO was approved by the DFG. The project started on 1 February 2026.
Scientific and university collections and museums are undergoing rapid digital transformation. An increasing number of collections and museums are bringing their objects into the digital public sphere. Not only is the number of objects available as digital surrogates growing, but so is the depth of the descriptive metadata available on the internet. A standardized naming practice for objects—one that reliably serves the needs of experts in the respective field within scientific discourse as well as those of neighboring disciplines and the interested public—is therefore essential. However, no corresponding thesaurus currently exists.
In the THIMO project, a network of experts is now being established, comprising collection managers in the field of medical history, specialists in vocabulary projects, information science experts, and experts from (collection- and museum-related) informatics. The network’s task is to develop strategies for the collaborative creation of a thesaurus as a research-relevant information infrastructure. The network is to be built through a series of workshops over two years and will culminate in a project dedicated to the concrete development of a thesaurus of historical medical objects.
The consortium partners are the Medical Collection of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen, the Medical History Collection of Ruhr University Bochum, the Medical and Pharmaceutical History Collection of Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, and the Berlin Medical History Museum of Charité.
