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Digitizing photographic archives: Project-linked opportunities and pitfalls: The role of Europeana in an institutional digitization landscape

Started in 1989, the digitization by the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA) of its inventory of over 1,000,000 original photographs of the cultural heritage in Belgium had to be readjusted several times. The collection consists of negatives and positives, on glass plates and film, from the late nineteenth century up to the more recent high-resolution digital photography. A short overview of important moments in the experiences of digitizing this material, including the scientific data on the represented objects and scenes, will be presented with examples pointing out why certain decisions proved to be very fruitful, but also sometimes rather painful. Digitization is a broad and vague concept, so KIK-IRPA had to face all kinds of evolutions over the years, the advantages and disadvantages of the law of the handicap of a head start, the lack of information then against the flooding of information now, the personalities of the people involved, institutional mentalities, and more. All this will be taken into account to arrive at the speeding up of digitization during the last decade. In recent years some external opportunities did influence the process, and as such also the pace of reacting, pro-actively at times, to these new situations. Two specific cases of content delivery to Europeana will be presented as use cases: one with 1,500 digital images of Art Nouveau art works and a more massive project with 100,000 digital objects, both with roughly the same time span and budget. The impact of both projects on the digitization efforts of the institution will be discussed.