The digitisation of lantern slides in the Beazley Archive

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The digitisation of lantern slides in the Beazley
Archive

• Claudia Wagner, Oxford University
• Beazley Archive
• Classics Centre 66 St Giles, Oxford OX1
  3LU Great Britain
• tel. [phone] email
  claudia.wagner_at_ashmus.ox.ac.uk

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History of the Beazley Archive

• The original archive of Sir John Beazley, Lincoln
  Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art from
  1925 until 1956, was purchased for the Faculty of
  Classics in 1965. On his death in 1970 it was
  brought to the Cast Gallery Ashmolean Museum.
  Within a few years the personal archive of
  material relating to the study of classical
  archaeology and art was transformed into a
  research resource for students and scholars. It
  consisted of photographs, notes, drawings, books
  and impressions from engraved gems. The
  photographs of Athenian vases are the largest
  archive of this class in the world and were the
  basis of Beazley's life's work.
• The collection now contains
• an estimated 500,000 notes
• 250,000 black and white photographs
• 33,000 negatives
• 7,000 colour prints
• 2000 books and catalogues
• 50,000 gem impressions
• While the original archive was being enlarged and
  enhanced, a new electronic archive was being
  created. From 1979 computers were used to
  document Athenian figure-decorated pottery c.
  625-325 BC. Today that database has more than
  130,000 records, 150,000 images and 20,000
  registered users. The data structure and lists of
  terms developed for it have been the foundation
  on which other databases have been created since
  1992. They have also been made available to other
  scholars for comparable databases on a variety of
  materials being compiled elsewhere.
• In 1998 all the assets of the electronic archive
  were put on the world wide web with the intention
  of combining resources for advanced scholarship
  with programs for the public. The Beazley Archive
  website had several thousands of fixed HTML pages
  with many thousands more programatically produced
  on demand from the various databases (Casts,
  Pottery and Gems), an illustrated dictionary of
  more than 300 pages and 900 images,
  bibliographies for classical architecture,
  sculpture, gems, pottery, coins, history of
  collections and reception of classical art and
  illustrated programs for students about pottery,
  sculpture and engraved gems. During 2006/7 the
  site was redesigned to be W3C AA compliant.

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The digitisation of the lantern slides is one of
the latest projects of the Archive. We rely on a
host of volunteers to sort through the varied
material of slides, negatives and photographs,
accessible in our Antiquaria section. Lack of
resources mean that we have to make a selection
- the most unique and interesting - are added to
the database at the present moment.
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The formats and subject matter of our slides and
negatives is varied. A great proportion was made
as teaching aids and used in lectures by
successive generations of professors , lecturers
and curators of the Ashmolean Museum. Some
reflect the personal research and interests of
the academics and some are capturing excavations
and travels abroad. Beazley glass negative
12x6cm
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Large format glass slides of a previous era
often called lantern slides have moved into the
collectable phase

• Technological advances in the last two decades of
  the 19th century enabled individuals to produce
  their own photographs and to mount them on glass
  for projection. At the same time commercial
  firms began to mass-produce lantern slides on a
  variety of subjects, including travel and
  archaeology. The slide medium proved to be
  versatile it was possible to project
  photographic images as well as hand-painted
  lantern slides, allowing the production of
  diagrams and annotated maps and plans. There is
  ample evidence from various amateur scientific
  societies in Oxford that Oxy-hydrogen limelight
  was used to project lantern slides during
  lectures. In addition, these societies were
  creating their own lending libraries of lantern
  slides Advancements in film technology included
  the gelatine dry plate (in general use from 1879)
  and slightly later cut film and roll film were
  widely available making photography and
  development easier. Smaller hand-held,
  portable, cameras with instantaneous shutters
  produced for these film formats were in mass
  production by the 1880s and 1890s. This gave
  rise to the amateur photographer (Gernsheim
  Gernsheim 1988, 47-9). These developments were
  further reflected in the publication of new
  popular periodicals such as The Amateur
  Photographer (1884-1908 and from 1896 containing
  monthly supplements on Lantern Slides) and the
  Optical Magic Lantern Journal and Photographic
  Enlarger (1889-1903).
•  In the same way, in the Ashmolean Museum,
  individual lecturers were creating and collecting
  their own lantern slides. One of the earliest
  known collections was that of Professor Percy
  Gardner (1846-1937), the Lincoln and Merton
  Professor of Classical Archaeology, though it has
  not been possible to identify Gardners original
  slides within the larger collection. By 1896
  Gardner had established a photographic studio in
  the new Ashmolean Museum on Beaumont Street.
  In 1900 he reported that a considerable
  collection of lantern-slides has been formed for
  use in lecture, and catalogued. Four years
  later, he reported, the collection had been
  greatly extended.
• Professor Sir John Linton Myres (1869-1954), a
  younger colleague of Percy Gardner, also amassed
  a large collection of slides. Indeed, many of
  the earliest slides in the Institutes archive
  carry his negative numbers as listed in his
  photographic register. The subject matter of his
  collection, like his scholarship, was
  wide-ranging, spanning the topics of geography,
  texts and scripts, prehistoric archaeology,
  classical art, modern comparative crafts and
  technologies, and physical anthropology. There
  are slides of distribution maps, showing the
  diffusion of cultural traits, skulls depicting
  racial types, prehistoric Greek and Cypriot
  sites, primitive oil presses from North Africa
  and classical Greek statuary. Some of these
  images were duplicated, printed as photographs,
  and are contained in the Arthur Evans and John
  Myres archives of the Ashmolean Museum.

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The Lincoln Professors glass slide collection
built up as a teaching aid for the University and
the Ashmolean Museum
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The homepage of the Beazley Archive
www.beazley.ox.ac.uk
www.beazley.ox.ac.uk
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Antiquaria on the website photographs and glass
slides
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Sample record positive glass slideA simple
search is available for users categories can be
chosen on the left hand side
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Negative glass slide
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Photos can be enlarged and added to a personal
photograph album
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Users can create and save several photograph
albums
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Advanced search screen Photography
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Simple search screen
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XML of a resultdatasets are immediately
available (and editable) in XML)
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XDB an extensible databaseall the databases in
the Archive are based in XDB and can be
cross-searched
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XDB database definitionsXDB is a very flexible
database new fields can be added easily and
properties of the fields can be changed in an
instant
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The web-sites universal search fieldevery page
on the site has access to the universal search
field this searches the web-pages and the
databases. In this field an ever expanding
multilingual thesaurus allows synonyms and
German, French, Spanish and Italian terms
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Results page of the universal search fieldweb
pages are listed in the first field, database
results in the second
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Results for the search Lion Gate in Photography
databasemerged database result thumbnails
indicate the records and give access via links to
the full entry
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Other institutions interested in the preservation
of glass slides The Magic Lantern Society
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Other conventions in the digitisation of lantern
slides slide scanned twice (transparent and
reflective) to include information written on
labels
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Contactwww.beazley.ox.ac.uk

• Director of the Beazley Archive
• Professor Donna Kurtz
• donna.kurtz_at_beazley.ox.ac.uk
• Director of the pottery database
• Thomas Mannack
• thomas.mannack_at_ashmus.ox.ac.uk
• Director of the gem programmes
• Claudia Wagner
• claudia.wagner_at_ashmus.ox.ac.uk
• Emeritus Lincoln Professor
• Sir John Boardman
• john.boardman_at_ashmus.ox.ac.uk