Publishing WWII aerial photographs in geographical and library information systems

Elisabeth Verhelst,Bas Vanmeulebrouk,Frans I Rip,Liesbeth Missel

doi:10.18352/lq.8051

Elisabeth Verhelst, Bas Vanmeulebrouk + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.18352/lq.8051

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Abstract

The Library of the Dutch Wageningen University and Research centre houses a collection of aerial photographs taken by the Allied Air Forces. The collection is part of a project that aims to publish these images in a user friendly way so that they are accessible to a wide audience. This paper describes the nature of the collection and its particular requirements for publication, as well as the design and development of the application for collection presentation. The collection’s geographic characteristics dictated that the collection be presented together with other geographic materials such as digital historical maps and actual aerial photos. To create this information compilation, technologies from geographical information management were combined with technologies from library automation. This involved mainly metadata specification and management, but also usability design.

Highlights

Since 1994 the Library of the Wageningen University and Research (UR) centre houses a collection of aerial photographs taken by the Allied Air Forces, popularly known as the RAF-collection
We learned that the methods of both perspectives are the same, but the use of the content is very different
In order to manage the metadata content in both infrastructure perspectives (SDI’s and Library Information System (LIS)), we have used a methodology for metadata management that serves both worlds

Summary

Introduction

Since 1994 the Library of the Wageningen University and Research (UR) centre houses a collection of aerial photographs taken by the Allied Air Forces, popularly known as the RAF-collection. The dates of the photographs taken lie mainly between 1944 and 1945. As the ideas for a digital presentation to the public became more realistic, a first step taken by us was the digitization of the analogue photos to a resolution of 1,200 dpi and serving them on a plain website in 150 dpi samples This was done with a subsidy granted within the War Heritage Programme. (Erfgoed van de Oorlog) from the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport because of the collection’s large cultural and historical value The purpose of this website was merely to create visibility of the collection and to set up a web-shop to lower the need for handling the original photographs. Searching the collection for relevant photographs still had to be done by using the old digitized sortie maps From this originated the idea to create a geo portal according to the wishes of our clients: to be able to locate the Elisabeth Verhelst et al Fig. 2: Example of an aerial photograph.

Objectives

Conclusion