Animation of historical patents

Abstract

The Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin is an archive with thousands of patents from the 19th century. The documents include patent texts and figures as well as the comments of the reviewers. The paper is about first common activities of the archive and the Ilmenau University of Technology to make the documents available to a broad public. Aside of the digital reproduction and presentation of texts and images the activities focus on remodeling the technical devices and animate the models with WebGL in web browsers. In the created interactive animations different functional and constructive aspects can be explained to the viewers. The original content as well as the derived content like videos and interactive animations is finally made available in the DMG-Lib portal. The paper describes the used workflow and experiences as well as selected examples.