Hi Jane,
great idea, but unfortunately, those lists are useless: they were created in a hurry when the ministry responsible for cultural heritage decided they wanted to know about all cultural heritage monuments by the end of the year, so a small team of experts drove through every village and literally decided by rule of thumb which building fit the categories provided by law. The lists consist of nothing more than a really short description (one or two words) and a street address, they actually showed some of the folders to me. With further investigation, a not so small number of buildings listed won't be considered a monument anymore, some of the buildings have been teared down or modified over the past two-and-a-half decades... Not even the government agency uses those lists anymore, they will always have a look at the building when they're asked wether it's a monument or not.
In Hesse (and most other german states), it's the law and not an administration that decides which building is a cultural heritage monument. Therefore, there's no need to have lists everywhere. They're working on it, but it takes about 5 years to cover 500 monuments, since they take a really detailed look at the architecture, search in archives etc. Since the lists are not needed to protect the buildings, they have plenty of time and only very few people are working on it (usually just one guy per county, if at all). They won't complete the work until 2030 if they keep up the current pace.
For all areas of the state, we can however rely on a series of books called "Dehio", which lists _very_ special buildings like churches and town halls, who clearly fall under what the law considers a cultural heritage monument. During the Central Hesse project, we'll spend a weekend in an area just covered by those books and try to photograph as many of those monuments.
Best regards,
Kilian
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Jane Darnell
<jane023@gmail.com> wrote:
Kilian,
*****"
dot matrix printed lists from the 1980s"*****
I am impressed! This sounds like a perfect opportunity for some crowd-sourced lists on Wikipedia. It would be awesome to start a WikiProject specifically to do just this one set of lists in this one section of the country, and then maybe others will follow...
It could give a whole new meaning to Germany's nomination of "Wikipedia for World Heritage"!
Jane
Hi Maarten,
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 10:51 AM, Maarten Dammers
<maarten@mdammers.nl> wrote:
Awesome events! I love to see a blogpost about this. I will try to
add the Hesse lists this week. How are the lists coming along in
other parts of Germany?
I'm not sure, but there's a slow but steady progress. I'll try to get an overview until mid August, but I fear that there are many blank spots left. Hesse is as complete as it gets, for many areas not even the administration itself has usable lists (I visited them and they showed me some dot matrix printed lists from the 1980s that even they can't use as a tool to figure out which building is a monument).
While we have little problems converting pdfs and excel sheets we get, collecting the data in the first place is our biggest issue. Many organizations are hesitant to release their digital lists (even though it's publicized already) and we just don't have the capacities to talk to all of them personally.
I'll keep you updated.
Kilian