9. Newsletter Datenbank CARLA der HMT Leipzig
Dear readers interested in the CARLA database of the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig,
it hasn't been long since a newsletter from us landed in your mailboxes. And once again we have some very good news to tell you about.
Data recording successfully completed
Work on CARLA began in 2020 with a small project team and a rough design of the database. Since 2021, data has been actively recorded in CARLA and in May 2022, a project employee was even hired for this purpose.
After 5 years of project work and 4 years of data recording, we can finally announce:
Data recording in CARLA has been successfully completed!
Around 12,800 people, including over 12,700 students, have now been recorded and linked with biographical information from the study documents. Norm data exists for all persons in the German Authority File, which can be used to establish links to other projects such as musiconn.performance.
Completing the data recording is a huge milestone for CARLA. We are incredibly proud to have achieved this goal and look forward to all the other projects that we want to realise with and for CARLA. Because one thing is certain: the data recording may be complete, but the work on CARLA is far from over.
The story of a conservatoire student
In the last newsletter, we invited you to our presentation on the Night of Libraries on 4 April 2025. Let us tell you about that day briefly:
At 18:43 we started with our telling of the story of a Conservatory student. Johanna Maria Scheuffler, born in Lommatzsch in 1859, entered the Conservatory in 1876 and studied with Ernst Friedrich Richter, Carl Reinecke and Oscar Paul, among others, until Easter 1880. She performed on stage as a pianist at Conservatory events. She also appeared as a composer with two piano pieces of which we know. One of these pieces, the Novelette op. 2, was not only performed by a fellow student during her student days, but was also published in print. Both the presumably autograph manuscript of the piece and the rare printed edition are in the library's collection and can be viewed in digital form on sachsen.digital. The highlight of our presentation was a performance of this Novelette by HMT student Sebastian Fuß.
In addition to the presentation, between 11 a.m. and 10 p.m. there was the opportunity to make full use of the university's library and to marvel at an exhibition of historical materials from the library and the university's archive.
We would like to thank all the guests who joined us and made the first Night of Libraries a complete success.
Cultural data and data culture - CARLA at the NFDI4Culture Forum
The quality of the data in CARLA has been one of the top priorities in the project work from the very beginning. Now we have the honour of presenting our strategies and concepts at the NFDI4Culture Forum ‘Measuring the quality of cultural data - but how? Concepts, methods, potentials and the NFDI4Culture approach’.
On 19 May & 20 May 2025, both from 1 pm to 4 pm, the online event will focus on the evaluation of data quality, especially in the field of cultural data. On 19 May at 3:10 pm, we will present our approaches to creating and maintaining data quality in our presentation ‘Cultural data and data culture - strategies for more data quality in the CARLA project’ and discuss desiderata and solutions based on the FAIR Data principles.
You can find out more about the NFDI4Culture Forum and how to register for it here: https://nfdi4culture.de/id/E6144
Licences and citation
In order to improve the quality and availability of our data, we have held several consultations with the NFDI4Culture team since the beginning of the year. As a database and research environment for the Leipzig Conservatory, CARLA should be accessible to as many interested users as possible and provide high-quality data.
As a result of the consultation with NFDI4Culture, we have changed the licence for the data to CC0 1.0 Universal. The data is thus released into the public domain and we waive all copyright and related rights as far as legally possible. You may now copy, modify and distribute the data without prior permission and for any purpose. This makes our data even more open and easier to use.
We have also published citation suggestions on our ‘Licences and citation’ page. These should help you to cite the data more easily in line with good scientific practice.
Supporting CARLA
CARLA has received support from various sources since the start of the project. Whether expertise, additions to stock or financial resources, CARLA would not have been a success without this support.
If you would also like to support CARLA, we have now published a page with information on this. Under ‘Support CARLA’, you can find out what options are available to help the project and even get actively involved.
In addition to donating any originals on university history that you may have in your possession, you can now also donate to CARLA and contribute to transcriptions of the study documents.
Thank you!
As in every newsletter, we would like to thank you for your continued interest in CARLA.
If you have any further questions or comments about the CARLA database or any of the issues mentioned in this newsletter, please do not hesitate to contact us at carla@hmt-leipzig.de.
We hope you enjoy using the now complete data in CARLA!
PS:
To conclude this newsletter, we would like to introduce you to another special student of the Conservatory.
Anna Untucht (married name Sturmfels) was born in Leipzig on 16 December 1880. She began her studies at the Conservatory in 1895 and had, among others, singing lessons with Heinrich Klesse, Friedrich Rebling and Gustav Ewald, until April 1900. While she was still a student at the Conservatory, she received an engagement at the Leipzig City Theatre. This was followed by further engagements at the Leipzig Opera and the Cologne Opera House.
The soprano's voice was immortalised on a shellac record by Odeon Record in 1908. Untucht sings arias and duets by Lehár with her husband and tenor Fritz Sturmfels. You can find an audio sample in the SLUB Mediathek.
A portrait photo of Anna Untucht-Sturmfels can be found in the Manskopf portrait collection of the Johann Christian Senckenberg University Library in Frankfurt am Main.
Untucht's study records (inscription number 6840) from our collection:
Copyright
University of Music and Theatre „Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy“ Leipzig
University library
Grassistraße 8
04107 Leipzig
Tel.: 0341/2144-632
Fax: 0341/2144-634
author of the contents of the newsletter:
Elisa Klar
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