Project Albúmina: preserving photographic memories

Abstract

The present work presents a joint proposal from University of Málaga Image Technology Centre (CTI) and Central ICT Service (SCI), to create a digital photographic archive for the former. Such archive will contribute to the preservation of valuable memories supported on photographies by allowing easier access to the wider society. The University of Málaga Image Technology Centre (CTI-UMA) is an audio-visual producing facility aimed at photo and video-graphic and multimedia production. The photographic archive has half a million photographs, both from historic collections from the late nineteenth century and the 1980's and from the service daily work. The project aim was to facilitate the creation of a standards based electronic archive of the digital version of the originals and, at the same time, allowing for an easy creation of on-line exhibitions based on web quality versions of the original images, catering both to researchers and professionals and to the general public. The archive was supposed to be at the same time scalable and affordable. Any code used or produced for the project had to be open source, so other institutions could easily make use of our work for their photographic archives. The results are encouraging, as the project, in its present status, has allowed for the classification of over fifty thousand originals, increasing the productivity of the archival team fivefold, and the creation of three virtual exhibits, with their physical counterparts.