Europeana Photography (European ancient photographic vintage repositories of digitized pictures of historical quality) is a 36-month project (2012-2015) that draws together the photographic archives of 19 European public cultural institutes and private agencies under the leadership of the Catholic University of Leuven.
ICCU participates by coordinating the digitisation of the images of the historical archive of the Italian Geographic Society.

The aim of the project is to digitize and make available through Europeana, the European digital library, over 400,000 images from the first 100 years of the history of photography.
The idea behind this project arose out of the realization that the European portal includes many images of works of art, but few historical photographs as cultural objects in their own right, and not only because of what they reproduce.

Metadata will be provided to Europeana in English and in the 11 languages of the project partners. The selection of objects to be digitized takes into account the artistic, historical, social, photographic, aesthetic and documentation interest of the material. Such material is held in Europe both in public cultural institutions (archives, libraries, museums) and private agencies selling images; the diversity of the Europeana Photography consortium is thus one of the project strong suits, since it draws together partners with very disparate needs, purposes and methods. The Europeana Photography consortium is experimenting with the added value of the presence in Europeana of bodies whose primary goal is the commerce of images.

For more information: ic-cu@beniculturali.it