The Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum – established in 1930 – is one of eight research museums belonging to the Leibniz Association. The institution preserves, researches and teaches the history of the mining, processing and use of geo-resources across all of the relevant time periods. Its research areas include: archaeometallurgy, mining history, materials science, mining archaeology as well as The Research Laboratory and the Montanhistorische Dokumentationszentrum [Mining History Documentation Centre] or montan.dok.
There are four tours aboveground – Hard Coal, Mining, Mineral Resources and Art – that take visitors through the museum’s permanent exhibition. The visitors’ mine also offers an underground glimpse into various facets of mining. Along a 1.2 km-long tunnel network, visitors are given an idea of what everyday life was like underground, with historical technical developments in mining also on display.
Since 2001, the montan.dok at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum has been home to the museum’s collection of artefacts, the written sources of the Mining Archive of Bochum founded in 1969, as well as the collections of the library and the photo library. The contents of the academic collections of the montan.dok can be viewed from anywhere in the world, via the online database at http://www.montandok.de/.
Furthermore, as the research wing of the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum, the montan.dok conducts numerous research projects in areas such as mining, technological, social and industrial history, collection research and digitalisation. These research projects primarily concentrate on the analysis of historical mining developments during the age of industrialisation. The focal aspects encompass the issues surrounding the histories of industry, business, institutions, mentalities and culture.