Digitalisation of Art Historical Lantern Slides

In art history, using and accessing visual material is as important as having recourse to academic literature. The integration of reproductions in the form of photographic prints and slides into the discipline around 1900 shifted the methodological focus in research and teaching from source work to the image, leading to the creation of large collections of slides alongside library holdings of research literature. Whilst the advent of digital images led to the decline of analogue slide collections at universities, it consequently also renewed interest in these collections as historical objects with potential for new research contexts. Offering far-reaching insights into the histories of art, questions of canon(s) and collecting, as well as into the history of technology and photography, the digitisation of these slide collections presents an opportunity to preserve, access and use historic images in new ways. Although important slide collections around the world have been digitised, the scope, implementation and usability of these projects and their digitised objects are extremely varied. If art history wants to tap into these rich (re)sources, what is needed is not only consistent digitisation, indexing standards and controlled vocabularies, but also the integration into digital research environments and infrastructures. This poster presents the first steps and best practices for digitalising art historical lantern slides in order to make them available as research data.

The poster is based on my master's thesis "Challenges and Opportunities of Digitalising University Slide Collections", submitted in June 2023 at the Institute of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The study focused on the digitisation projects of the Slide Archive of Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar, Universität Hamburg (https://www.kulturwissenschaften.uni-hamburg.de/ks/einrichtungen/bildarchive/diaarchiv.html) and the Mediathek of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (http://www.kunstgeschichte.hu-berlin.de/institut/mediathek).