The Montanhistorisches Dokumentationszentrum – or montan.dok for short – is the central service facility for the preservation, restoration and conservation, development and accessibility of all the collections retained by the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum.
It integrates the much older departments of the Bergbau-Archiv Bochum (Mining Archive Bochum), the library and connected photo library together with the museum's collections. As part of the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, a research museum belonging to the Leibniz Association, montan.dok, with an industrial archive, a scientifically based specialist library and thoroughly heterogeneous museum collections, perfectly covers the documentation service requirements. In effect, it constitutes the collection-based research infrastructure of the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum.
The continuous development of the technological, social and industrial history collections means that the sources managed here are in great demand. In terms of the historical investigation of objects, we offer a particularly good mining historiographical facility, which can access material evidence, non-published writings and relevant secondary literature within the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum.
In addition, montan.dok conducts numerous research projects and is integrated into the research structure of the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum as the montan.dok research unit.
Collecting and preserving is one of the core tasks of a museum. Curiously, this usually happens in secret. In our third film, we show that preserving mining is not a dusty business at all and offer spectacular insights into the Montanhistorisches Dokumentationszentrum - an area that visitors do not normally enter.
Click here to watch our video on YouTube: