The Digital Beethoven House

An increasing number of cultural institutions accept the challenge to build digital libraries. They start the process of digitising and describing their treasures in order to present them to cultural audiences as digital media. So did the Beethoven House in Bonn who owns the largest and most valuable collection of the composer Ludwig van Beethoven. In cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute for Media Communication they realised the project The Digital Beethoven House (2001-2004). Original objects, manuscripts and music of Beethoven play the leading role in the digital collection, the online presence and the virtual environment. In the following paper we share our experiences in building, presenting and maintaining an awesome collection with the digital library community. Digital libraries are not an end in itself but the basis for semantic interrelations with similar repositories. We present the potential of further developments to provide additional services to the scientific community as well as the general public.