Speaker
Saskia van Bergen (Leiden University)
Abstract
Dutch amateur photographer Frank Scholten travelled to the Middle East in the early 1920s. He photographed contemporary life in British Mandate Palestine and documented archaeological and historical sites in the region. Scholten’s work is exceptional for its images of the daily life of Jews, Muslims and Christians alike. His collection contains about 14,000 negatives, 13,000 photographic prints, 65 albums of photographs, postcards, clippings and other archival material.
After his death, the collection was transferred to the Netherlands Institute for the Near East and from here to Leiden University Library in 2007. Apart from several hundred photographs used by Frank Scholten for his book La Palestine illustrée (1929, subsequent editions in English, German, and Dutch), most were unknown to the general public.
From 2019, UBL is engaged in a project to catalogue and digitize the whole collection. A big challenge, as the numbers are large, information scarce and part of the material was completely unsorted. How to do this as efficiently as possible? For this, a combination of AI and the efforts of a large group of committed staff and volunteers was used.
Thanks to Oxford University, image recognition could be used to unlock the collection. The original idea was to match the unsorted photo prints with the negatives. It soon turned out that image recognition could also be used to group all negatives and prints taken at the same location, or featuring the same people. This proved to be an ideal start for the cataloguing work, which could thus be carried out much faster. In a year and a half, two temporary staff managed to create basic records for all prints and negatives.
The next step was for all unsorted photographs and negatives to be sorted and repackaged by a large group of volunteers, so that physical and digital were once again a match. This was done in a number of workshops organized in the UBL, supervised by a coordinator. The volunteers had a background in photography, or came from the region themselves, with Jews, Muslims and Christians all working together.
Meanwhile, the entire digitized collection was made available via UBL: https://digitalcollections.universiteitleiden.nl/view/collection/frankscholten This created great interest from all over the world. Symposiums, publications and research projects followed. The next step for further disclosure of the collection is enrichment of the metadata. Again, AI technology will be used for this, combined with physical workshops. The aim is to let users search the collection in a more intuitive way, by means of questions and answers. The AI technology can help the volunteers in their task (e.g. by providing information on all photos where the same subject is depicted), but they, in turn, will also ensure that the AI continues to improve.