The Amadei Collection: Digitization – Open Data – Public Outreach
- Hosting organisations
- University of Vienna
- Responsible persons
- Gernot Mayer
- Start
- End
The project “The Amadei Collection: Digitisation - Open Data - Public Outreach” focuses on digitising and making accessible a significant portion of historical photographs from Count Albert Amadei’s collection (1851–1894). This collection, considered an art historical image repertoire, is being explored and presented using innovative digital methods. The aim is to develop sustainable solutions for the digital transformation of analogue collections and to provide the results as open data for research purposes.
About the Project
The project includes several key steps:
- Digitisation of approximately 800 photographs from the Amadei Collection, complemented by previously digitised materials, resulting in over 4,000 digital objects.
- Enrichment of the digital objects with metadata, supported by AI-assisted methods.
- Development of a public presentation platform based on the open-source web publishing platform Omeka, connected to the internal image database UNIDAM (easydb).
- Academic exploration of the collection through an accompanying course, where students analyse selected objects.
The digitisation is carried out cost-free in the photo lab of the Institute of Art History. The project’s results are published on the Omeka project page and are publicly searchable.