Open Foto Ateliers

Our early experimental use case is a linked open collection of Photographic Ateliers in Budapest. The collection area will be gradually extended to other localities in the historic Hungarian Kingdom and beyond, to other European cities, and potentially non-European cities. The time period of our use case is 1844-1923.

The first known photograph made in the Pest part of current Budapest is dated from 1844 (blog post-image). We find the release of photographs that are at least 100 years old prudent from a rights management perspective. We will add a sub-collection of contemporary “Now & Then” photos with Free Cultural Work license.

Collaborative collection policies

The Open Foto Ateliers collections contain the following collections of photographs (originals and their digital copies, and in the case of ‘now’ places, digital originals), small prints, text and data

Early private photographs

Reverse side collections

The photographers & their ateliers

We do not have yet a photograph of Schmidt, Ede himself yet.

Historical photographs of ateliers

We do not have yet a photograph of Schmidt Ede fényképészeti műterme yet.

Other related small prints

Now & Then

Gelocational and cadastrial data

The original building of 61 Baross street (in the 19th century: Stáczió utcza) was destroyed. Budapest grew significantly since Ede Schmidt worked here, and the former working class district is currently on the edge of the core downtown area surrounded by the Nagykörút ring.

Database

The Open Collections Database will be released on the European open science portal Zenodo under a CC0 license (as relational database and as semantic database serialized in nquads.)

Catalogue

Time period

We focus on the the period closing with 1923, because usually the rights management of photographs that are at least 100 years old is less problematic. It is very unlikely that these photographs are subject to copyright or other moral rights restrictions.

Open Collaboration: Gradual Extension of the Collection Area, and Connecting Similar Collections

Most of the information related to these photographs is documented in Hungarian or German. However, as Austria-Hungary was a single polity, even current Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of one cultural space and market. Various Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Bosniak, Ukrainian, Romanian, French, and other language documents may appear, even though the lingua franca of these countries and spaces is no longer German or Hungarian but English. Linking together historic and current building cadastres, maps, photo collections, biographic encyclopedias, and other sources demonstrates the use of the open-linked collection concept.

The collections are made of interconnecting collections with geographical coverage. The geographical coverage is determined by the knowledge and the capacity of the open collection curator. It could potentially be as small as the current 5th district of Budapest (which at the beginning of the period was Pest, then the 4th district of Budapest in the collection period) or as large as current Slovakia, which was a borderless part of the Hungarian Kingdom with artistic and photography life being centralised around Budapest and Vienna.

FAIR collections: from yet another scanned file to a web resource

The idea of Open Photography Collections is making a step forward from treating a digitised copy of a small print as a series of still images (scanned as an image) or as an OCR-text. We help you make the digital cultural object and your catalogue new web resources that can be put on timelines and connected to other images, texts, persons, and modern and historical addresses. You no longer read it as strings but as a thing; your scanned small print, in this case, a pricelist, becomes from a digital still image or text a digital price list.

In more technical terms, this is our application of the FAIR principle of open science. We make this price list, and it is individual items more findable and more accessible. We facilitate interoperability between OpenStreetMaps, photographer encyclopedias, camera collections, and commercial history exhibitions. Eventually, this leads to a much higher reuse potential: a simple PDF document became a web resource that can be found by many curators or collectors, and it can be linked to various map applications, other open collections, or linked open data resources.

Using the semantic web or linked open data technology is nothing new in the cultural heritage sector: information scientists (formerly known as library scientists) in large national libraries and national archives are the avant-garde users of this new layer of the world wide web.

Examples:

• You may want to synchronize your contents to archive.org and/or Wikimedia.
• You collect material about an artist. You would like the data to be correct on all pages of Wikipedia, and your photos be present in Europeana and Flickr Commons.
• Your items should have an inventory book and catalogue that matches the ISAD(G) standard, the locational data is connected and searchable on Google Maps and Open Street Map.

Open Linked Collections Offering

The mission of Open Collections Network is to find suitable web-based solutions (such as the digital storage and collections management service of archive.org, or the digital heritage aggregation and search engine of Europeana) that can be used by small public and private collections that do not have an IT department (or not even an IT-specialist) at their disposal.

We want to ensure that these services—with self-developed but open-source plugins and connectors when necessary—, are available for even the smallest collections—because we believe that that is where new hidden gems can be found, not in the world’s biggest and most researched collections.

Reprex invites small private collections, small public collections, and open-source developers to its Open Collections Network platform to

• Consolidate a critical mass of small users to remain competitive on large global platforms.

• Curate open-source software that is suitable for the needs of small private and public collections.

• Create new tools and integrations of small or affordable public services for better archiving, digitisation, collection management, rights management, dissemination and publication activities of collections.

• Educate users managing small collections without IT, information or data specialists about making their collection more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

• Provide service interoperability with linked open data, harmonised and collaborative market/user research, and the best practices of the rights management of commercial, out-of-commerce and public domain cultural objects.