Emagines is a project, funded since 2006 by the German Research Foundation (DFG), for digitizing the large and partially very old collections of images held by the

German Archaeological Institute The German Archaeological Institute (german: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, ''DAI'') is a research institute in the field of archaeology (and other related fields). The DAI is a "federal agency" under the Federal Foreign Office of Germany ...

(DAI). The German Archaeological Institute (DAI) and the Research Archive for Ancient Sculpture (FA) are cooperating in the long-term strategic operation of a database ''Arachne'' which aims at making these digitized images accessible worldwide.

Requirements and aims

The project began with the glass negatives from the departments of the

German Archaeological Institute at Athens The German Archaeological Institute at Athens (german: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI), Abteilung Athen; el, Γερμανικό Αρχαιολογικό Ινστιτούτο Αθηνών) is one of the 19 foreign archaeological institu ...

, Istanbul and Cairo (Emagines1) in 2006. Negatives from Rome, Madrid, the headquarters in Berlin and the Eurasia-Department of the DAI were added during the second project phase in 2008 (Emagines2). These negatives mostly contain historical images of

sculpture Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable ...

, topography and architecture, much of which no longer exists in its former condition. Furthermore, the negatives are severely threatened by physical decomposition and destruction due to environmental influences, natural catastrophes like

earthquake An earthquake (also known as a quake, tremor or temblor) is the shaking of the surface of the Earth resulting from a sudden release of energy in the Earth's lithosphere that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes can range in intensity, fr ...

s and (in the long run) manual use. The project aims at the permanent digital preservation of the negatives and their content. Until being made available in the Arachne database, widespread use of these negatives has been hindered by the way they have been scattered and by the partially overlapping nature of their images they carry. The digitized image holdings are

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educatio ...

ed by the DAI and are therefore shown to the Arachne guest with the water mark of the DAI. The internet presentation of the images also provides a platform for an e-commerce system, still in a test phase. Within the database framework, textual information about the objects depicted in the images will be continually updated by the DAI by citing new bibliographical references. The

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases s ...

was modified not only with regard to its contents, but also technically in response to the heterogeneous material, which varies greatly in type, chronology and cultural history. a new entry mask has been developed to describe the essential characteristics of the material in many of those object groups, and some of the existing entry masks needed to be extended or customized.

Workflow

To avoid exposing the fragile contents from the risks of long-distance transport, the images are being scanned in the departments of the

(DAI) in an ongoing process. The scanned images are then sent to the Research Archive for digital processing, entry into a database and long-term storage on the SAN of the

University of Cologne The University of Cologne (german: Universität zu Köln) is a university in Cologne, Germany. It was established in the year 1388 and is one of the most prestigious and research intensive universities in Germany. It was the sixth university to ...

for the DAI. The resulting documentation-complex is a centralised scientific of the DAI which can be accessed by web.

Data

84,298 (week 51 in 2009) glass negatives are currently available in Arachne. About 44,000 of these belong to the Emagines2 project. A fuzzy meta-search for the character string 'Emagines' results in about 48,000 hits in different categories, including the glass negatives. The glass negatives can be referenced through 84,298 records using image-navigation.

External links

Powerpoint presentation-EMAGINES
{Dead link, date=December 2019 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes DAI Workshop at Berlin, 12/2009 * Emagines at th
Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History
conference (Florence, Italy) Archaeology of Germany

Requirements and aims

Workflow

Data

See also

External links