News Item | 21. May 2026
New guidelines on the digitisation and long-term archiving of porcelain figurines for reproduction
By Jörg Heseler and Dr. Martin Albrecht-Hohmaier
Restaurator bei der Arbeit
"Ein Restaurator im Rahmen der Rekonstruktion einer Kakadu-Figur aus Porzellan, kombiniert mit einer schematischen Darstellung des Wegs von Materialien in ein digitales Langzeitarchiv." CC BY-SA 4.0 Creator: Sabine Peinelt & Jörg Heseler, Owner: SPK und NFDI4Culture
A new guide has recently been published as part of the Culture Knowledge Base, the origins of which date back to the first funding phase of NFDI4Culture. In it, Jörg Heseler provides a detailed account of the technical and craftsmanship requirements and workflows, using the Meissen porcelain figurine ‘Kakadu’ (Cockatoo) as an example, and demonstrates in exemplary fashion all the steps necessary for such a reproduction.
The long-term preservation, traceability, and reproducibility of cultural artifacts require a coordinated interplay of digital preservation, standardized metadata, and traditional craftsmanship. Using the example of “Kakadu”, this guideline presents a conceptual framework that defines and documents — in a structured and machine-readable way — the essential characteristics for faithful reproduction, including geometry, color, materiality, and manufacturing context.
The framework integrates historical production techniques with modern methods of 3D digitization and additive manufacturing. It is based on the structured recording of significant properties in XML and their embedding within a standardized metadata framework (METS/MODS). In this way, a digital reproduction ecosystem is established that enables museums, archives, libraries, and workshops not only to preserve digital replication data but also to actively incorporate them into future production and research processes.