Shelves. From floor to ceiling: shelves. Hundreds of metres of them. Full to bursting with boxes, folders, documents. They have piled up in the extensive basements of Setra’s main administrative building in Neu-Ulm during more than 125 years of Kässbohrer company history. Some are historically important, some curious, some perhaps superfluous. And month after month, the customers, journalists and fans come by in the hope of asking the Setra Archive for a copy of, say, a special technical specification, a certain image or a particular brochure they are looking for.

“Until recently, we sent these requests down to an intern in the basement,” recalls Sabine Honold, the archivist who runs the Setra Archive for Daimler Buses. “They would be more or less successful at finding them, then we would copy and send them. Patience was the watchword.”

Now, an extensive digitisation project has come to the rescue, making the work of the Archive much easier. “Digitisation helps us get an overview of what documents and photos are actually in existence,” Honold explains. At the same time, historically important files, images and films need to be preserved for future generations and made accessible to the wider public.

The archivists at the yet more extensive Daimler Group Archives already had plenty of experience with digitisation. This meant that specialists from Stuttgart were the first port of call and most important advisors when the project to digitise the Setra Archive in Neu-Ulm began in 2017.

“Together with our colleagues from Stuttgart, we worked out the fundamental structure for archiving, determined a cataloguing system and chose selection criteria for incorporation in the archive,” Sabine Honold says, describing the preliminary works.

For more than three years, trained specialists worked carefully, metre by metre, through the archive shelves, capturing thousands of brochures, construction specs and photos using special scanners and entering the scans in a filing system. In doing so, they concentrated on documents from the Setra brand – particularly, on documents relating to Setra buses from 1951, when Otto Kässbohrer presented the first self-supporting bus bodywork.

“We are now able to access the majority of the archive digitally. Every item has had keywords assigned to it, which means it is connected to search terms allowing it to be found more easily in the database. This works similarly to a search engine online,” Honold explains. “Thanks to the systematic keywording, we can download every document, construction drawing and photo rapidly and provide them in a digital format."

If you are interested in particular documents, photos or brochures from the Setra archive, you can simply send an email.