A Participatory Interface for a Photo Archives

GLAM institutions have continuously digitised their analogue material since the beginning of the 21st century. Also, the number of digital repositories has grown, and the pressure for open or FAIR data has increased. However, most digital assets need more visibility and usage. This is particularly problematic because storage and continuous migration are cumbersome and expensive tasks. To improve this situation, we design a participatory web platform with tools to make annotating, contextualising, and organising images and their meta information easier. The project “Participatory Knowledge Practices in Analogue and Digital Image Archives” is developed in cooperation with the photo archives of the Swiss Folklore Society (SSFS, Basel, Switzerland). The Swiss National Science Foundation funds it from 2021 to 2025, and here, we present an intermediate project status. The interdisciplinary research team consists of scholars from the Bern Academy of the Arts, the Cultural Studies and European Ethnology, and the Digital Humanities Lab of the University of Basel. The PIA team (Participatory Image Archives) aims to make the platform available to researchers and the general public to conduct Citizen Science research.