The digitisation of lantern slides in the Beazley Archive

1. 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.: +44 (0)1865 278103 email: claudia.wagner@ashmus.ox.ac.uk

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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 Gardner’s 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 Institute’s 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.

6. The Lincoln Professor’s glass slide collection: built up as a teaching aid for the University and the Ashmolean Museum

7. The homepage of the Beazley Archive: www.beazley.ox.ac.uk www.beazley.ox.ac.uk

8. Antiquaria on the website: photographs and glass slides

9. Sample record: positive glass slideA simple search is available for users: categories can be chosen on the left hand side

10. Negative glass slide

11. Photos can be enlarged and added to a personal photograph album

12. Users can create and save several photograph albums

13. Advanced search screen Photography

14. Simple search screen

15. XML of a resultdatasets are immediately available (and editable) in XML)

16. XDB: an extensible databaseall the databases in the Archive are based in XDB and can be cross-searched

17. 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

18. The web-site’s 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

19. Results page of the universal search fieldweb pages are listed in the first field, database results in the second

20. Results for the search ‘Lion Gate’ in Photography databasemerged database result: thumbnails indicate the records and give access via links to the full entry

21. Other institutions interested in the preservation of glass slides: The Magic Lantern Society

22. Other conventions in the digitisation of lantern slides: slide scanned twice (transparent and reflective) to include information written on labels

23. Contact:www.beazley.ox.ac.uk Director of the Beazley Archive: Professor Donna Kurtz donna.kurtz@beazley.ox.ac.uk Director of the pottery database Thomas Mannack thomas.mannack@ashmus.ox.ac.uk Director of the gem programmes Claudia Wagner claudia.wagner@ashmus.ox.ac.uk Emeritus Lincoln Professor Sir John Boardman john.boardman@ashmus.ox.ac.uk