Carolin Pommert is Head of the Medical Humanities Library & Collection at the Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Ethics at Charité (Berlin) since 2023. After completing a Master’s degree in Entrepreneur of the Arts – a course with an artistic focus – she studied the restoration and conservation of audiovisual and photographic cultural heritage. She subsequently worked both on a freelance basis and in permanent positions for museums, archives and libraries, as well as for galleries of contemporary art. Alongside her focus on the conservation of analogue historical and contemporary cultural heritage, she became involved at an early stage in the preservation of digital-born media art, digitisation processes and database structures.

Upon joining the Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Ethics at Charité in 2020, she reorganised the collection’s more than 300 diverse historical items. As a result, this rich and varied collection is now more easily accessible for research, teaching, art and interested users far beyond the Berlin area. Additionally, digitisation strategies were developed in collaboration with the Charité’s Berlin Museum of the History of Medicine (BMM). The Medizingeschichte Charité collection portal now serves as a presentation platform and research tool for both institutions.

In the Centre for Advanced Study “Access to Cultural Goods in Digital Change”, Pommert examines issues relating to the use of sensitive medical imagery – in particular depictions of patients and diseases – in teaching image collections on the history of medicine, as well as in educational and scientific films. Digitisation and presentation are often necessary for the cataloguing and scholarly study of such material. However, access to these materials requires regulations and restrictions that have not yet been uniformly clarified.

In addition to her work with the academic collection, Carolin Pommert is actively involved internationally in the fields of emergency management and cultural heritage rescue. She volunteers with the KulturGutRetter project under the patronage of the Federal Office for Technical Assistance (THW), the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Leibniz Centre for Archaeology (LEIZA).

Publications can be viewed here.