Digitization of glass negatives in collection 2.1 from the municipal bureau of photography

• Applicant: Dr. Johannes Rosenplänter
• Subject Area: Architecture, Building and Construction History, Construction Research, Sustainable Building Technology ; Art History ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2019 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 415727053

Kiel City Archives are planning to digitize the body of glass negatives from the former municipal bureau of photography, which is considered to be of particular historical value. The digitized images will then be made available online under a free licence. The collection consists of c. 5,900 glass negatives, mainly in bigger formats (9x12, 13x18, 18x24). The glass negatives guarantee exceptional quality images. The bundle of property rights rests with the City of Kiel, so digitizing and distributing will not be limited by other copyrights.The images in this collection document the city's development and architecture, destruction and rebuilding from imperial times in the late 19th century to the 1950s. The main body of the glass negatives shows city architecture as it was before 1945. Therefore it is a particularly high-quality source for the history of architecture of Northern Germany. Apart from this it offers a wealth of material for accessing the city's history through the history of everyday life and its relationship with naval and industrial history.The project is expected finish in 2020. The glass negatives will be digitized by a private contractor by mid-2019. They will then be added to the City Archive database and integrated with the existing metadata. After a final check of the data the images should be publicly available from June 2020.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• Co-Investigator: Christoph Freitag