CASE STUDY 2 – Fotógrafos alemanes en Américana latina. By Laboratorio de Investigación Social del Instituto Mora (Mexico)
The collection Fotógrafos Alemanes en América Latina [German Photographers in Latin America] is a virtual collection consisting of images taken by German photographers in several parts of Latin America between 1894 and 1955. The original photographs are in archives in Mexico, Argentina and Brasil, and are brought together-by way of digital copies and a unified cataloguing methodology-on the Web site Huellas de Luz [Marks of Light] . That site is part of the project Heritage Preservation, Information Systems, Access and Research, undertaken by the Audiovisual Laboratory for Social Research at the Instituto Mora, in Mexico, in collaboration with the archives that hold the original materials.
This project has the following distinguishing features:
– We strengthened international and inter-institutional ties through collaboration.
– We used technology to virtually bring together related collections that are physically disperse.
– Catalogued data was modeled using simple symbolic Artificial Intelligence technology (Semantic Web) (part of a broad thread of work that this project is inscribed in).
– We studied interface design for computer-human interaction in access and search of digital collections.
– The project was conceived as interdisciplinary research spanning problems in social science, archival science and computer science.
– We combined the production of theoretical and methodological proposals with research on specific topics and/or research geared towards concrete products (such as online collections, software development).