The PHAROS consortium of fourteen international art historical photo archives is digitizing the over 20 million images (with accompanying documentation) in its combined collections and has begun to construct a common access platform using Linked Open Data and the ResearchSpace software. In addition to resulting in a rich and substantial database of images for art-historical research, the PHAROS initiative supports the development of shared standards for mapping and sharing photo archive metadata, as well as for best practices for working with large digital image collections and conducting computational image analysis. Moreover, alongside their digitization efforts, PHAROS member institutions are considering the kinds of art-historical questions the resulting database of images could be used to research. This article indicates some of the prospective research directions stimulated by modern technologies, with the aim of exploring the epistemological potential of photographic archives and challenging the boundaries between the analogue and the digital.

This article focuses on the research that the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art has conducted with users in the process of digitising its photo archive. Converting this resource from photographs mounted on card to digital assets appears, at first glance, a relatively straightforward digitisation project. However, the questions, challenges and issues raised by this project have prompted us to not only focus on the ‘how’ (the process of this conversion), but also the ‘why’. As the project has progressed, these questions about why we are digitising our photo archive and what benefit/s this will have to users and its impact on the field of British art history in the future have grown more voluble.

The PHAROS consortium is adopting the Linked Art data model to make its descriptions of photo archives collections available as Linked Open Data to further support scholars in their research. Linked Art is both a community and a data model. As an international community, it works together to create a shared data model to describe art. As a data model, it is a data profile of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and using Linked Open Data techniques. The goal of Linked Art is to enable museums and developers to engage in LOD initiatives more easily by providing them with shared data modelling decisions and consistent design principles.

The photography collection of the German documentation centre for art history, Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte – Bildarchiv Foto Marburg (DDK), comprises more than 2.8 million objects. These include roughly 500,000 glass negatives, of which nearly 3,000 were made by the first Hessian state conservator Ludwig Bickell between 1870 and 1901. These early glass plates show a large number of retouchings and traces of their production and usage. This makes them rich sources for photographic and art historical or cultural historical research as well as conservation studies.

The Courtauld Institute of Art is two years into a digitisation project of the Witt and Conway photograph archives (in addition to other, smaller collections) – a massive project that will make accessible over three million images of works of art from these internationally important photo collections. This article looks closely at the digitisation project and in particular, at the small army of volunteers assembled to carry out the digitisation and how this element of public engagement is essential to the success of the project.