Historical archive on tourism
The Historical Archive on Tourism (HAT) is an archive for historical documents on tourism and travel in Berlin . It makes this material accessible for research and teaching as well as for the media, tourism and exhibition.
The basis of the archive, which was established at the Free University of Berlin in 1988 , is made up of larger contemporary historical collections from the tourism industry and state tourism advertising, which have been expanded through purchases and donations. The inventory comprises a total of over 600 meters of shelving. This makes the HAT the largest collection of its kind in Europe. Brochures and other advertising materials (so-called ephemera ) as well as an extensive magazine collection make up a large part .
There is also a wealth of literature:
- tourism science literature (since 1900)
- Travel guides ( greaves , Meyer's travel books , Baedeker etc.)
- So-called. Gray literature (conference reports, tourism policy concepts, sales guides, etc.)
- Country customers
- aesthetic literature
- Travel reports and itineraries from "pre-tourism" times
- statistics
There are also numerous other materials such as private photo albums, posters, tapes, videos, files and cards. The time focus is on the 19th and 20th centuries; the oldest pieces date from the 17th century. The spatial focus is on German-speaking countries, but the collection encompasses all continents.
The journal inventory (approx. 250 periodicals with several thousand volumes) is almost completely recorded in a database, the book inventory is currently around three quarters (approx. 13,000 titles). The database can only be researched on site; Extracts and the entire data set (in various formats) can be found on the archive page on the Internet.
The scientific development and maintenance of the inventory was made possible by funds from the Volkswagen Foundation and has since been funded by the Willy Scharnow Foundation . Affiliated to the archive was the Tourism History working group , founded in 1988 , the first scientific association of its kind.
After the tourism studies course at the Free University of Berlin was discontinued in 2009, the archive was transferred to the Center for Technology and Society and the Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Technical University of Berlin . The historian and sociologist Hasso Spode is in charge .