Accepting and Holding Objects "in Trust"

Conference and Conference Proceeding

On the basis of how libraries, archives and museums have so far dealt with cultural objects held “in trust”, national and international librarians, historians, curators and legal experts discuessed from May 2 till May 4, 2018, how to deal with cultural property or looted property held "in trust" in libraries, archives, museums, and Jewish institutions.

While ordinary kinds of acquisition in cultural institutions, i.e. purchases, donations, deposit copies or exchanges, have been examined within the scope of NS provenance research, another type of transaction has been mostly overlooked so far. It concerns the transfer of objects with conditions attached, with institutions accepting items “in trust”, as loans or as legacies, or objects being allocated to institutions by the state, which occurred as part of NS book and art looting as well as in the course of later political developments.

The conference proceeding is published in June 2018 in the collection "Bibliothek im Kontext" at Vienna University Press.

Olivia Kaiser, Christina Köstner-Pemsel und Markus Stumpf

Organisation & Editors





Conference Programme, abstracts and CVs

With the kind support of:

Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies of the University of Vienna