A Window on the Past

I just spent a fascinating hour looking at photos from the Weimar Republic that the German National Archive (Deutsche Bundesarchiv) recently uploaded to Wikipedia Commons. The 100.000 digital images date as far back as 1832 and extend all the way to 2006.  You can access the photos by date here, but the images have also been sorted according to topic and photographer, as far that information is avaible.

The New York Times writes about this project in today's edition:

"As would be expected from a trove of 100,000 photographs, there are the bizarrely mundane and the breathtaking: in 1984, transporting lumber in Bad Berka in Thuringia, Germany; in 1919, a family of 11 living in poverty in a single room, photographer unknown.

The archive’s motives were not entirely selfless; it hopes to harness the Wikipedia editors to improve the cataloging of the photographs, said Oliver Sander, who is responsible for the collection at the archive. There are 58,000 people in these photographs who lack an ID number assigned by the German library, and the archive would like Wikipedia editors to help identify who is in these photographs and add these codes. “Unfortunately, we don’t have the capacity to implement this with our list of people,” Dr. Sander said. “Maybe Wikipedia members could add this ID to our list. That was the first benefit from Wikipedia.”

Thus far, 29,000 photographs of people have been so coded, Dr. Sander said."

in an interview in Netzpolitik.org, Matthias Schindler of the Wikimedia Foundation Communications Committee explains that this is just the begiinning of a much larger project, for the 100.000 digitized images represent a tiny fraction of the collection: the Bundesarchiv has over 11 million photographs.