Bibliotheca Hertziana
Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte
The Hertziana DataHub is a web-based research environment developed at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte in Rome. It integrates heterogeneous data sources around a shared identifier layer — Wikidata — making monuments, artworks, artists, and architects explorable across institutional boundaries from a single interface.
A map-based interface allows researchers to navigate Rome and other Italian cities spatially, discovering heritage entities in their topographic context. Selecting a monument or artwork surfaces bibliographic references from the Hertziana's digitized holdings, photographic records from the Fototeca, catalogue entries from KuBiKat, and structured data from Wikidata, the ICCD, and the Getty.
The textual layer draws on a corpus of over 10,000 digitized books in which toponyms have been tagged with Wikidata identifiers — enabling entity-centric full-text search across the entire digitized collection for any given building or artwork.
The result: a researcher asking about the Palazzo Farnese can move seamlessly between its location on the map, its treatment library monographs, archival photographs, and linked-data descriptions — without leaving the interface.
Bibliotheca Hertziana — Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, 2026. For errors or info please contact us.
The Carafa map (1775) is reproduced under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 with kind permission of the David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.