Founded in 1765, TU Bergakademie Freiberg is widely regarded as the oldest university of mining sciences in the world, a distinction the university itself claims and one repeated across reference works (TU Bergakademie Freiberg). It is also one of Germany’s most digital universities. In 2026 it was named Saxony’s best digital university and ranked among the country’s Top 25 (22nd nationally) in the UniNow “Digital Campus Award 2026”, with students rating its digital teaching and administration especially highly. As Vice-Rector Swanhild Bernstein put it, digitalisation is not an end in itself but a way to extend in-person teaching with digital offerings (blick.de, May 2026).
That digital culture runs straight into heritage and research. In early June 2026 the university hosts the 77th BHT – Freiberger Universitätsforum (3–9 June), a forum of 13 colloquia that this year includes the 10th workshop “Digitisation in Geoscientific Collections – From AQUiLA to DINA” (TU Freiberg programme preview). Embedded within it is the 20th Freiberg Colloquium of Young Researchers, presented by EURECA-PRO from 8–12 June 2026, which gathers PhD researchers from across the alliance for interdisciplinary exchange, company and institution excursions and a training course on excellence research for sustainability (EURECA-PRO), its programme including a hands-on “Digital Mining” laboratory tour on 9 June (colloquium schedule). Around these events, the university is steadily turning its scientific heritage into living, accessible resources: digitising teaching collections of chemical instruments and iron-metallurgy artefacts under the VirtFa@TUBAF “virtual teaching collections” initiative (TU Freiberg), and developing “digital twins” and augmented-reality reconstructions of hidden industrial-cultural and natural heritage in a regional Geopark, complete with a 3D virtual tour and an educational outdoor game (TU Freiberg research).
The lesson for the DTH community is vivid: digital transformation need not pull a university away from its history. At Freiberg it does the opposite, pulling depot-bound collections back into teaching and global research, and letting a 260-year-old mining academy speak fluently to the next generation.
