This research covers a total of 803 individual projects by 140 artists at 252 schools between 1996 and 2015. As key data from a total of five years (1996, 1999, 2001, 2002, 2003) are no longer available for the Magdeburg regional office due to the expiry of the ten-year retention obligation for project documents, these were estimated on the basis of the previous and subsequent years and the budget distribution key of the Berufsverband Bildender Künstler Sachsen-Anhalt. If these unreported figures are included, a total of around 926 individual projects can be assumed. The same applies to the number of project hours, which increased from 12,891 to 14,615 as a result of the estimate. This means that no information is available for just over 13% of the individual projects carried out. The following table shows the gaps for the individual years.
The documentation of the individual projects could not be included in the research. Moreover, as there are no specifications for their form and scope on the part of the project sponsors, their systematic review would have made little sense and would also have required an unreasonable amount of time. In addition, the location and completeness of the documents can no longer be fully determined. However, a large part of the documentation from the years before 2001 is in the archive of the Cranach Painting School in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, where it is actively used (as of January 2017, see also project history). The study is therefore unable to provide answers to questions on certain project specifics. This applies in particular to statements on, for example, class levels, group sizes and composition, project duration, project month(s), project formats, artistic disciplines, integration into regular lessons and the voluntary nature of participation. In future, such key figures should be defined as required and recorded uniformly for each individual project.
When visualizing the geodata, information on the artists’ places of residence was only processed anonymously for data protection reasons and only presented in summary form, i.e. to the exact zip code. The names of the artists were handled in the same way and were not mentioned in the research results.
In the analysis of the distances between the artists’ places of residence and the school locations, artists with undocumented residences or residences that are (now) outside the state of Saxony-Anhalt are not included. This means that only 121 out of 140 artists (=86%) are included in this specific analysis.
When considering the continuity of collaborations between artists and schools, one-off participations in the project are not taken into account and are therefore excluded. This reduces the database for the entire period to 95 artists, 127 schools and 691 projects.