New Techniques for the Digitization of Art Historical Photographic Archives - the Case of the Cini Foundation in Venice

Numerous libraries and museums hold large art historical photographic collections, numbering millions of images. Because of their non-standard format, these collections pose special challenges for digitization. This paper address these difficulties by proposing new techniques developed for the digitization of the photographic archive of the Cini Foundation. This included the creation of a custom-built circular, rotating scanner. The resulting digital images were then automatically indexed, while artificial intelligence techniques were employed in information extraction. Combined, these tools vastly sped processes which were traditionally undertaken manually, paving the way for new ways of exploring the collections.