FAIR Photos: Transforming a collection of two million historical press photos into five-star data

The collection of Fotopersbureau De Boer (Noord-Hollands Archief) is particularly notable for its abundance of subjects and size. It contains valuable material for research on current topics such as environment, energy, and social inequality, and provides a glimpse into the everyday lives of people. Although the collection is accessible at the archive's website, it cannot easily be used due to its lack of standardisation and the omission of external references.

This project will enrich the metadata of the collection by linking them to thesauri of locations, persons, and keywords in order to further open up the collection for use in research and the cultural heritage sector. This newly added information will be stored back into the collection management system of the archive for sustainable storage. When completed, the project delivers a download of all the curated and enriched metadata as spreadsheet (CSV), as well as Linked Open Data (RDF).

This poster was presented at the CLARIAH Tech & Data Day, June 29, 2023.