EuropeanaPhotography
EUROPEAN Ancient PHOTOgraphic vintaGe repositoRies of digitAized Pictures of Historic qualitY
EuropeanaPhotography was a digitisation project which played a key role in ensuring that digital content related to ancient photography is accessible in Europeana.eu.
As of 2012 Europeana.eu had an impressive mass of images mostly representing cultural objects. Photographic images, the early ones in particular, were underrepresented. EuropeanaPhotography filled this gap by providing photographic masterpieces from 1839, with the first example of images from Fox Talbot and Daguerre, to the beginning of the Second World War (1939).
The EuropeanaPhotography consortium gathered together 19 partners from 13 Member States, including private and public photographic agencies and cultural institutions holding important photographic collections. This public-private partnership was quite unique in the Europeana group of projects; private partners demonstrated how they can derive commercial value from participation in Europeana while the public ones showed how to derive benefits from their cooperation with the private sector.
The EuropeanaPhotography content providers digitised over 430,000 photographic items for Europeana.eu; the provided metadata was made available in all the 11 languages spoken in the partners' countries. This core of documents illustrated historical moments of European life, landscapes and people, home and clothes, social and economic changes. The collections were be organised in four main themes:
- Places (cities – as the transformation of Paris by Haussmann and of Barcelona by Gaudi -, landscape – as the country side in Europe in the 19th century);
- People (portraits as Queen Victoria, the Popes, Garibaldi, and Coco Chanel -, daily life, etc.);
- Events (political events – as la Commune de Paris -, local and civil wars, royal weddings);
- Trends or movements (industrial revolution, women's emancipation, artistic movements, geographic explorations).
Dissemination and promotion involved several activities and tools: beside the official website, EuropeanaPhotography owned a dedicated showcase inside the Digital Meets Culture online magazine, and was present in scientific publications and periodicals. The public sector of the cultural institutions and the private/commercial sector of the photographic archives were the target sectors of dissemination.