The Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s acquisition logs provide a record of the inventories of the museums’ collections and reflect the eventful history of the evolution of the collections and the provenance of the items that make them up. The logs of the Ethnologisches Museum record the previous owners and the formal accession conditions of what were usually extensive groups of objects.

The logbooks, their historical titles and the vocabulary used in them should be viewed as historical documents. The information they contain is often not able to reveal the current location, the relevant department or even the collection to which the objects now belong. For example, departments with designations such as “India” or “Amerikanische Naturvölker” no longer exist, and the inventory of the former Kunstkammer collection is now distributed across various institutions.

The digitisation of the acquisition logs made available here was carried out between 2018 and 2024 as part of the DFG project Digitisation of the Historical Archive of the Ethnologisches Museum (1830–1947). Through this project, all the collection inventories, files, and other associated documentation currently held by the Ethnologisches Museum, dating from the year 1830 up until 1947 were digitised and published online. The index (PDF, 4 MB) produced through this project offers a central point of access to the digitised holdings. In addition, the digitised documents and their associated data can be accessed via the online database of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (German only).