Photography | Open Collections

Linking Open Small Prints

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0100

Hatschek & Farkas photo-, amateur cinema-, optician specialist store, photography and cinema lab. 83th price list (May 1939). Original name, districting and spelling of address: Budapest, IV, Károly király út 28, Gerlóczy ucca sarok. Current: Budapest, 1052 (District V), Károly körút, Gerlóczy utca sarok—map—current streetview—archive.og.

The aim of our Open Print Collections is to store various formats of small printed material. In this example, we show a scanned camera price catalogue from May 1939.

Hatschek & Farkas was not only a photography store: its photography book publisher had an oversized impact on amateur and professional photography in pre-war Budapest.

What’s in the Price List?

Our featured digitised small print, the 83rd price list of HAFA, features new and used cameras that gives a rough overview of what was available for a starting amateur, a working-class person with a low salary, or a serious pro at this time. Or, you would think that this catalogue is a good starting point for a collection of downtown Budapest’s commerce right before the onset of the 2nd world war.

HAFA and Hungarian photography education

They employed Iván Hevesy, the avantgarde artist,literature, photography and film theorist, who became the author of countless, widely used books and booklets aimed at the education of the amateur photographer.

The cosmopolitan Budapest of this era was an important centre of modern photography of the early 20th century. Many world-known photographers, like Robert Capa, Marton Munkacsy, Brassaï, or André Kertész, started their careers—and almost certainly visited at least one of HAFA’s shops.

How to make your item findable?

Using this small print for research purposes in simple, digitsed PDF files is not straightforward. Starting with the fact that Hungarian is not a widely spoken language, and it has changed a lot since the 1930s: online translation tools will not help you much. Even for Hungarian-speakers, the front page already sets roadblocks. The street names and the districting of the Budapest addresses changed after the 2nd world war. The Hungarian spelling of the simple word ‘utca’ for the word ‘street’ was normalised with earlier ‘ucca’, ‘utcza’ versions. It is unlikely that this document will ever be used for any purpose if it is not connected to more timely, easier-to-read, and easier-searched information.

View Larger Map

The area of the original HAFA store changed: important buildings were destroyed in the siege of Budapest. The 4th district was made 5th district, and Károly király út (road) became Károly körút (ring).

When we talk about linked open archives, we do not only mean that this small print is available in high-resolution scan and modern, Hungarian OCR-recognized, readable, searchable PDF format with an open culture license. You may want to be able to place similar price lists on a timeline so that you can see the price evolution of cameras in 1939. Or, you may want to place photography stores on an Open Street Map or a Google Map. You write a historical novel, and you want to check if a certain camera could have been available and affordable for your imaginary hero starting a photojournalism career. You want to connect this price list to a camera museum and simultaneously to the cameras of Robert Capa, Marton Munkacsy, Brassaï , or André Kertész.

Hatschek & Farkas photo-, amateur cinema-, optician specialist store, photography and cinema lab. Original name, districting and spelling of address: Budapest, IV, Károly király út 28, Gerlóczy ucca sarok. Current: Budapest, 1052 (District V), Károly körút, Gerlóczy utca sarok—map—current streetview.

FAIR collections: from yet another scanned file to a web resource

The idea of Open Print Collections is making a step forward from treating a digitised copy of a small print as a series of still images (scanned as an image) or as an OCR-text. We help you make the digital cultural object and your catalogue new web resources that can be put on timelines and connected to other images, texts, persons, and modern and historical addresses. You no longer read it as strings but as a thing; your scanned small print, in this case, a pricelist, becomes from a digital still image or text a digital price list.

In more technical terms, this is our application of the FAIR principle of open science. We make this price list, and it is individual items more findable and more accessible. We facilitate interoperability between OpenStreetMaps, photographer encyclopedias, camera collections, and commercial history exhibitions. Eventually, this leads to a much higher reuse potential: a simple PDF document became a web resource that can be found by many curators or collectors, and it can be linked to various map applications, other open collections, or linked open data resources.

The mission of the Open Collections Network is to promote the GO FAIR agenda in the field of cultural heritage and commercial collections.
GO CHANGE: focusing on priorities, policies and incentives for implementing FAIR
GO TRAIN: coordinating FAIR awareness and skills development training
GO BUILD: coordinating and creation of FAIR technology

Using the semantic web or linked open data technology is nothing new in the cultural heritage sector: information scientists (formerly known as library scientists) in large national libraries and national archives are the avant-garde users of this new layer of the world wide web.

Examples:

You may want to synchronize your contents to archive.org and/or Wikimedia.
You collect material about an artist. You would like the data to be correct on all pages of Wikipedia, and your photos be present in Europeana and Flickr Commons.
Your items should have an inventory book and catalogue that matches the ISAD(G) standard, the locational data is connected and searchable on Google Maps and Open Street Map.

Open Linked Collections Offering

The mission of Open Collections Network is to find suitable web-based solutions (such as the digital storage and collections management service of archive.org, or the digital heritage aggregation and search engine of Europeana) that can be used by small public and private collections that do not have an IT department (or not even an IT-specialist) at their disposal.

Photo transfer bag. Fotó átadó tasak—HAFA, Hatschek és Farkas fotólaboratórium, c1941—Fortepan 162745 (donated by Andor Gara)—Europeana.

We want to ensure that these services—with self-developed but open-source plugins and connectors when necessary—, are available for even the smallest collections—because we believe that that is where new hidden gems can be found, not in the world’s biggest and most researched collections.

Reprex invites small private collections, small public collections, and open-source developers to its Open Collections Network platform to

Consolidate a critical mass of small users to remain competitive on large global platforms.
Curate open-source software that is suitable for the needs of small private and public collections.
Create new tools and integrations of small or affordable public services for better archiving, digitisation, collection management, rights management, dissemination and publication activities of collections.
Educate users managing small collections without IT, information or data specialists about making their collection more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
Provide service interoperability with linked open data, harmonised and collaborative market/user research, and the best practices of the rights management of commercial, out-of-commerce and public domain cultural objects.

Open Foto Ateliers

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 19:00:00 +0100

Our use case is a collection that connects early private photographs of known and unknown subjects, the person of the photographer, the atelier (and company) of the photographer, the building, the internal or external view of the historic photographic creation location, connected to the digitised advertisement, placed on Open Street Maps or Google Maps.

Table of Contents

Our early experimental use case is a linked open collection of Photographic Ateliers in Budapest. The collection area will be gradually extended to other localities in the historic Hungarian Kingdom and beyond, to other European cities, and potentially non-European cities. The time period of our use case is 1844-1923.

The first known photograph made in the Pest part of current Budapest is dated from 1844 (blog post-image). We find the release of photographs that are at least 100 years old prudent from a rights management perspective. We will add a sub-collection of contemporary “Now & Then” photos with Free Cultural Work license.

Collaborative collection policies

The Open Foto Ateliers collections contain the following collections of photographs (originals and their digital copies, and in the case of ‘now’ places, digital originals), small prints, text and data

Early private photographs

Early private photographs were collected in photographic ateliers in the target area mainly before 1923 and exceptionally before 1945. Mainly carte de visite and cabinet or similar cardboard mount.

Reverse side collections

Mounted early photography’s reverse sides usually contain information about the photographer, the atelier, and the photograph’s subject. Late 19th-century and early 20th-century reverse mounts can be considered to be valuable small print design objects of their own.

Baross utca 61., Schmidt Ede fényképészeti műterme. (Historic name: Stáczió utcza or ucca) Fortepan 81342

The photographers & their ateliers

Historical photographs of photographers connected to private photos made in their ateliers, their atelier’s reverse design, and images of the atelier itself now and then.

We do not have yet a photograph of Schmidt, Ede himself yet.

Historical photographs of ateliers

The photographers and ateliers connected to their buildings, and streetfronts from target area before 1923 and exceptionally before 1945.

We do not have yet a photograph of Schmidt Ede fényképészeti műterme yet.

Other related small prints, connected to the other collections, such as advertisements of the photographers or their ateliers (companies) in the collection.

Now & Then

A modern, Free Cultural Work licensed photograph of the current state of the atelier, its building, the building that replaced the original location, and the streetview of the place.

We will connect the Open Collections websites to the The Maps Embed API which will provide periodically refreshed street views of the locations. Because the reuse of the Google Street View images is problematic, we suggest to create a new collections of current views under the Free Cultural Works Creative Commons license.

Gelocational and cadastrial data

We connect the inventory items to a future-proof location: geocoordinates, building cadasters.

View Larger Map

The original building of 61 Baross street (in the 19th century: Stáczió utcza) was destroyed. Budapest grew significantly since Ede Schmidt worked here, and the former working class district is currently on the edge of the core downtown area surrounded by the Nagykörút ring.

Arcanum, a private company, accidentally seated in Budapest, provides excellent services to various European archives, maintains a historical, but not open map service called Europe in the XIX. century . We will provide links (but not reused content) from such specialist databases. Following this link you can check out this location on various maps between 1775 and 1941 as if you were browsing Open Street Maps or Google Maps.

Database

A database of ateliers, buildings, locations, photographers and photos.

The Open Collections Database will be released on the European open science portal Zenodo under a CC0 license (as relational database and as semantic database serialized in nquads.)

Catalogue

A linked, open catalogue that meets ISAD(G) archive collection standards, and can be presented in RDF form following the Europeana EDM data model and the Wikidata model for sharing.

Time period

We focus on the the period closing with 1923, because usually the rights management of photographs that are at least 100 years old is less problematic. It is very unlikely that these photographs are subject to copyright or other moral rights restrictions.

Open Collaboration: Gradual Extension of the Collection Area, and Connecting Similar Collections

Most of the information related to these photographs is documented in Hungarian or German. However, as Austria-Hungary was a single polity, even current Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of one cultural space and market. Various Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Bosniak, Ukrainian, Romanian, French, and other language documents may appear, even though the lingua franca of these countries and spaces is no longer German or Hungarian but English. Linking together historic and current building cadastres, maps, photo collections, biographic encyclopedias, and other sources demonstrates the use of the open-linked collection concept.

The collections are made of interconnecting collections with geographical coverage. The geographical coverage is determined by the knowledge and the capacity of the open collection curator. It could potentially be as small as the current 5th district of Budapest (which at the beginning of the period was Pest, then the 4th district of Budapest in the collection period) or as large as current Slovakia, which was a borderless part of the Hungarian Kingdom with artistic and photography life being centralised around Budapest and Vienna.

FAIR collections: from yet another scanned file to a web resource

The idea of Open Photography Collections is making a step forward from treating a digitised copy of a small print as a series of still images (scanned as an image) or as an OCR-text. We help you make the digital cultural object and your catalogue new web resources that can be put on timelines and connected to other images, texts, persons, and modern and historical addresses. You no longer read it as strings but as a thing; your scanned small print, in this case, a pricelist, becomes from a digital still image or text a digital price list.

Examples:

You may want to synchronize your contents to archive.org and/or Wikimedia.
You collect material about an artist. You would like the data to be correct on all pages of Wikipedia, and your photos be present in Europeana and Flickr Commons.
Your items should have an inventory book and catalogue that matches the ISAD(G) standard, the locational data is connected and searchable on Google Maps and Open Street Map.

Open Linked Collections Offering

Photo transfer bag. Fotó átadó tasak—HAFA, Hatschek és Farkas fotólaboratórium, c1941—Fortepan 162745 (donated by Andor Gara)—Europeana.

Reprex invites small private collections, small public collections, and open-source developers to its Open Collections Network platform to

Consolidate a critical mass of small users to remain competitive on large global platforms.
Curate open-source software that is suitable for the needs of small private and public collections.
Create new tools and integrations of small or affordable public services for better archiving, digitisation, collection management, rights management, dissemination and publication activities of collections.
Educate users managing small collections without IT, information or data specialists about making their collection more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.
Provide service interoperability with linked open data, harmonised and collaborative market/user research, and the best practices of the rights management of commercial, out-of-commerce and public domain cultural objects.

Photography

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 19:00:00 +0100

Our Open Photography Collections store digital photographs—born digital items and digital surrogates of analogue prints, slides or negatives—, catalogue them to a high standard, and connect them to locations, buildings, people and other things via linked open data (semantic web) techniques. Whenever possible, we aim to make a preview (low resolution) or a high-resolution digital copy available.

Photography as documentation for other music, film, folklore, architecture or other collections.
Private photography
Art photography
Early and historic photography

Listen Local Photography Project & Collection

The Listen Local Photography Collection is a part of our Open Photography Collection. It is mainly, however, a supporting collection of our Open Music Collection, particularly that of the Listen Local Music programme. This is an ongoing project.

The aim of the collection:

Document contemporary and historic music scenes and ecosystems.
Provide at least one Free Cultural Works for encyclopedias, music resources, blogs, website about artists, musicians, musicologists and key persons in music scenes.
Aim to include some high quality works of photographers to promote portrait and stage photography.

See the Listen Local Photography collection definition.

How to participate in the project?

Open Foto Ateliers Collection

Baross utca 61., Schmidt Ede fényképészeti műterme. (Historic name: Stáczió utcza or ucca) Fortepan 81342. See in case study.

This is a use case for open collaboration in terms of linking collections, and linking their catalogues, and placing them on global knowledge graphs for content and knowledge exchange.

See the Open Foto Ateliers collection definition.

Listen Local Photography Collection

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 09:27:00 +0100

The aim of the collection:

Document contemporary and historic music scenes and ecosystems.
Provide at least one Free Cultural Works for encyclopedias, music resources, blogs, website about artists, musicians, musicologists and key persons in music scenes.
Aim to include some high quality works of photographers to promote portrait and stage photography.

See the Listen Local Photography Project.

Listen Local Artists Collection

Photographs provided to us by artists, bands, their labels or management for the promotion of local music scene with Free Cultural Works license organized by Listen Local music collection (either by geography or music genre.)

OOPUS (folktronica, Estonia.) See our Data & Lyrics blogpost: It’s about carving out your own path.

Local Musicians & Music Professionals

Portraits of musicians and music professionals (artists, managers, technicians) organized by Listen Local music collection (either by geography or music genre.)

Marie de la Montagne (Czechia.) See our Data & Lyrics blogpost: ‘I lived in the mountains for six years, and I loved it because it was a place where you needed to rely on yourself to survive.’.

Listen Local Live Collection

Listen Local artists photographed on stage.
Photographer credits, exact date and location, preferrably time, too.