New Stories of the Digital and Physical Past

What do a world-famous fairy-tale writer's job application to Royal Danish Library, a 30-year-old hard drive containing the ideas and fictional family trees of a living author, Denmark's first female architect, and postcards sent by two young men who set off to roll across Europe in a barrel shortly before the outbreak of the First World War have in common?

They are all topics in this year's edition of Fund og Forskning, Royal Danish Library's scholarly journal.

The issue includes a themed section on “digital histories”, featuring four articles: Royal Danish Library's retro-digitisation efforts from the 1990s to the present day, the use of AI to interpret historical photographs, the preservation of Svend Åge Madsen's hard drive, and user perspectives on the Dance Archive.

The issue also contains an article about Agnete Laub Hansen, whose achievements until now have been reduced to the single fact, that she was the first Danish woman to graduate from the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.

Finally, the volume presents a series of shorter discoveries about selected items from the library's collections. These include H. C. Andersen's job application from 1834, which, fortunately for world literature, was rejected. Postcards published by the two adventurous journeymen who never got far, but whose story is nevertheless a far-reaching account about the postcard as a medium of mass communication, as well as Royal Danish Library's digitisation of a large part of the picture collection, containing more than 300,000 topographical postcards. There's also recently released material that has been classified for decades, but which provides new knowledge about the married couple Carl Nielsen and Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen as well as about the author Leif Panduro. And finally, also the preservation and documentation work that has taken place in the archives of the Danish association "Women in Music".