Retroconversion of a catalogue of hidden images relating to Eastern and South-Eastern Europe and digitisation of historical photography collections (ImagOst)
Project Manager: Tillmann Tegeler
Project Editor: Susanne Lang
Funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (2025–2028)
ImagOst is a pilot project for the development of historically relevant image sources for research on Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The retroconversion of a catalogue of hidden images and the digitisation of historical photographs will create research opportunities that significantly improve access to this important source material. ImagOst thus follows on from the IOS's previous project on hidden maps, GeoPortOst, and builds on the experience gained there.
The project is based on an extensive card catalogue from the East European Institute Munich, a predecessor institute of the IOS. The catalogue lists images from monographs and anthologies on Eastern Europe on 15,625 index cards. Some cards refer to more than one image, so that over 20,000 images can be traced. Retroconversion generates data records for the images, which are linked to the data records of the parent works and imported into B3Kat. This means that the catalogued images are available in the Regensburg catalogue, in Gateway Bayern and in Osmikon, the Research Gateway for Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe.
The second step involves digitising relevant image material. A selection of copyright-free hidden images and historical photographs, including those from the collections of the predecessor institutions, the East European Institute Munich and the Institute for Southeast European Studies, will be made available as digital copies in open access. Since the card catalogue contained hardly any images relating to Southeastern Europe, a further 120 publications with images will be catalogued and made available for digitisation, with a focus on portraits and views of places. In addition, image material from the digitisation projects on Jewish and German-language periodicals from Eastern Europe will be included in ImagOst and indexed accordingly.
Beyond cataloguing the images, ImagOst will offer research support functions. To this end, the digitised images will be linked to the annotation tool Recogito, offering users the opportunity to comment on, locate, enrich with standard data and share the images.
In collaboration with the Division Author/ Title Cataloguing of the Bavarian State Library, a ‘Guide to Cataloguing Hidden Images as Component Parts of Independent Works’ is being worked out, thereby contributing to the development of standards for cataloguing dependent images.
Funded by
