Time and again, the language of collecting and preservation is cloaked in florid rhetoric whenever museums, their purposes and their holdings are evoked – even though the museum world is scarcely bound by legal definition. A closer look at the history and evolution of any institution, not least our own, quickly dispels such illusions. This volume contrasts the bourgeois collecting ideals of prominent nineteenth- and early twentieth-century owners with the Marxist-Leninist notion of collecting as practised in the GDR.

The research centre DIGITAL ORGANOLOGY at the Museum of Musical Instruments, University of Leipzig, brings together an expanding pool of closely interlinked research data across multiple collections. These data provide a framework for tracing the histories of musical instruments and the collections to which they belong. This infrastructure is designed not only to support detailed, object-based studies, but also to enable large-scale analysis through distant-reading tools. The same applies to provenance research, which, with its legal and ethical obligations, poses major challenges for university museums – in organological scholarship, academic teaching, and the wider transfer of knowledge to society.