Community and Interoperability at the Core of Sustaining Image Archives

Abstract

In our paper, we discuss how the digital domain extends the sustainability of analogue archives through communication with the public. Our interdisciplinary research project “Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives” (PIA) is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (2021–2025) and developed in cooperation with the photographic archives of the Swiss Society for Folklore Studies (SSFS). It aims to increase the use of image-based research data by developing participatory tools and deploying shared application programming interfaces (APIs) such as standards that adhere to the Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD) design principles. By involving the public, the project aims to increase the overall use of image-based research data. This makes data more sustainable in interaction with the analogue archive and increases the attractiveness of digital infrastructures.

Re-Imagining the Collection of the Kreis Family

“…The overall research results in a participatory visual interface (Participatory Image Archives) for three different collections, one of which is the Kreis Family Collection, a collection of private family photographs. The goal of our overall research is to design an interface that enables the annotation, contextualization, and linking of images and their metadata, thus promoting participatory use of the PIA platform (Felsing et al, 2023). An example of this is the use of machine and human-made image annotations (Cornut et al, 2023).…”