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Historical Photographs from the Basel Mission Archive on the Web

Basel Mission Archive
Barbara Frey Naef
Switzerland

During the last twelve years access to the medium-sized collection of images from Ghana, Cameroon, South India, South China, Kalimantan and Europe has been improved considerably.

• The images (ca. 28'400) were re-photographed on long-lasting film and transferred for in-house use to a CRV disc in 1992. Transfer of images on this high-resolution film via KODAK PhotoCD to the web-site server has been realised last year. For presentation in the internet, the images are encoded in JPEG format in three different resolutions.
• The database system (ACCESS) is centered around the images and contains files on single image entries ("master") linked to the analogue or digitized images. There are linked files covering entities, personal and institutional names, lists of subject keywords and geographical terms.
• We regard historical photographs not as published works but as objects in a collection. We therefore decided not to use library but museum standards in our cataloguing. The hierarchized lists of subject keywords and of geographical terms were built up according to the International Standard, ISO 2788, Documentation Guidelines for the establishment and development of monolingual thesauri.
• Linking up with ECAI demands that we consider our database in the light of GIS and metadata standards.
• Problems of identifying historical geographical terms in African and Asian countries will be discussed in this presentation, and the current solutions, including synonym references, will be shown.
  
  The ACCESS database system has recently been transferred to a relational database (Postgre SQL). This will serve as the back-end of the advanced internet/web application which will be presented in this conference in a trial version.