This database contains personal data on the teaching staff at the Georg August University of Göttingen from the first lectures and courses in 1734 until 1962, the year in which the 225th anniversary of the university, officially inaugurated in 1737, was celebrated.
The database is based on the Catalogus Professorum Gottingensium by Wilhelm Ebel. In his function as head of the Göttingen University Archives, he had supplemented and restructured the data collected in 1929 by Max Arnim on the teaching staff at the Georgia Augusta.
In his compilation, Ebel focused on the one hand on the "entirety of university teachers" as circumscribed in §8 of the statutes of the University of Göttingen of 6 March 1948 (see Ebel, Catalogus, p. 7). This includes full professors, honorary professors, (civil servant and non-civil servant) associate professors, chair substitutes, private lecturers ("Privatdozenten"), visiting professors, lecturers and technical teaching staff. On the other hand, he added to these the curators and (pro-)rectors, as well as the university’s syndici, judges, councillors, university preachers and library directors – offices which were mostly held by full professors in a secondary capacity. Though not belonging to the teaching staff in Ebel’s sense, the so-called "Exerzitienmeister" are also part of the catalogue, these including riding instructors, fencing instructors, dancing masters, music teachers as well as writing and drawing masters. Ebel, however, did not involve the "Universitätsverwandte" (e.g. university booksellers and printers, university mechanics, university copper engravers, etc.) which were listed in a separate register and were also subject to the university’s jurisdiction until 1852.
The Catalogus Professorum Gottingensium was digitised and captured with automatic text recognition (OCR). The text was divided into individual records, with each entry corresponding to an entry in the Catalogus. These records can be searched by name, faculty affiliation, status group and office/function. Details on the life data as well as supplementary information were taken from Ebel’s original work. The database is aimed at an extension and, if necessary, completion of the data records. As a rule, the individual personal data records are linked to the Integrated Authority File of the German National Library (GND) and other authority files, which facilitates research within the specific group of persons of the Göttingen university teaching staff up to 1962. The sources used by Ebel for each individual record can be accessed via a list of abbreviations and a bibliography. In addition, a linkeage to the Kalliope Union Catalogue enables a differentiated person-related research in collections of personal papers and manuscripts.
The database is associated with the project "Indexing the Archive of the SUB Göttingen, 1734–1812", which is funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture’s programme "Pro*Niedersachsen - Cultural Heritage - Collections and Objects".
Questions concerning the content of the database are answered by Christian Fieseler (fieseler@sub.uni-goettingen.de) and Steffen Hölscher (hoelscher@sub.uni-goettingen.de); for any technical problems please contact the Metadata dept. (met-support@sub.uni-goettingen.de).