Archive

Archival methods

Archives provide a variety of historical evidence (e.g. images, documents, audio) that can be used to gain insight into and an understanding of past geographies. Tempelhof Airport has a long and interesting history. With the airport closure in 2008, the operating institution – the Berlin Airport Association (Berliner Flughafengesellschaft) left an archive documenting the building history starting in 1924 until its closure in 2008 including the development of the building, the Nazi era (1933-1945) and the period during American occupation (1945-1993) and remaining years. Documents are successively being restored and digitized. The archives are located in the Eastern wing of the airport building and are open to visitors by appointment to conduct archival research.

In addition to the Berlin Tempelhof Airport archives, the Internet Archives provides another great resource to access a variety of open-source and public domain archives. A simple search using your preferred keywords will provide the results of data you can access (see urban gardening example). Additionally, accident log reports are also available for archive research (see a crash report archive log example). There are also additional videos available that are posted on YouTube that may provide ideas as to how archive data and information is used to provide historical documentaries on the Berlin Tempelhof Airport. See examples here provided by the Washington Post or ZDF.