The University of Strasbourg has a long history dating back to the 16th century. Its libraries and faculties hold rich heritage collections, including ancient books, herbaria, maps, projection plates, photographs, and casts. In the last quarter of the 19th century, following the defeat of France by Prussia in 1870 and the annexation of the Alsace region by the newly created German Empire, the university was refounded as Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität, becoming one of the most modern academic institutions in Europe. German authorities wanted to promote scientific knowledge, both to show German excellence and to foster the development of the region, thus rendering the annexation acceptable among the local population. Significant sums of money were invested in the development of the university, allowing the construction of brand-new buildings, the hiring of renowned academics, and the purchase of vast collections of books and objects for teaching and research purposes. Rich teaching apparatuses – Lehrapparäte in German – were, therefore, constituted during the German period (1871–1919) but also after the return of Alsace to France at the end of the First World War. French authorities were eager to emulate their German counterparts to prevent any form of nostalgia (Bischoff & Kleinschmager, 2010).^[1]

Although some have disappeared, many of the items acquired at the time have been preserved to date and constitute the core of the university’s heritage collections. With a few exceptions, ancient books are well accounted for and kept in adapted library storage rooms. Other objects, however, usually remain the faculty’s responsibility. Their storage conditions are unequal: some of them have been included in restoration projects and are now well-preserved, such as the corpus of geographical projection plates entrusted to the local public archives (the Archives d’Alsace). However, other objects are still kept in damp and dusty premises, often without proper inventories. Nevertheless, increasing numbers of researchers are aware of the scientific interest of these heritage documents that give an insight into how people taught and conducted their research in the past.

Until the beginning of the 21st century, historical works on education, teaching, and research mostly focused on the political or sociological dimensions of the subject. Teachers’ and researchers’ professional practices were deemed less important and scarcely taken into account, at least in France. Only recently, in the last 15 to 20 years, have such practices started to be closely scrutinised. Both librarians and researchers have rediscovered numerous objects collected in the attics and basements of universities, such as illustrated teaching boards, projection plates, and ancient ceramics (Lagrange, 2017; Bouteloup, 2023). This new wave of interest has been fostered by the development of digital humanities, which has allowed bringing this heritage to a wider audience. In Alsace, the region’s history has, on occasion, led to a special emphasis on comparative approaches underlying the differences and similarities between French and German pedagogical techniques.^[2]

In this context, since the middle of the 2010s, the Strasbourg University Libraries have conducted several digitisation projects, some of them in close connection with local research teams. In the coming pages, we will present two of these projects (one involving a corpus of photographs and another one involving a corpus of glass projection plates), focusing more specifically on how librarians and researchers have collaborated on them.

The digital repository in which these heritage documents are visible today is called Numistral,^[3] and it is common to three higher education institutions (the National and University Library; the University of Strasbourg; and the Université de Haute-Alsace, located in Mulhouse and Colmar) and one public library (The Mulhouse Municipal Library). The first digital heritage repository was created at the University of Strasbourg in 2006; in 2019, it became a member of Numistral under the guidance of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, which encourages universities and other higher education institutions to develop common services. Initially, the University of Strasbourg’s digitisation policy focused on ancient books requested by readers or selected by librarians. Gradually, however, a new approach was adopted: librarians and researchers started working together to constitute wider corpora of documents related to specific topics or disciplines, such as archaeology, history of art, or numismatics. Some of these projects benefitted from special funding by the university, which was keen to promote its past and heritage. The collaboration between libraries and research teams was an evident asset in obtaining these funds.

The Digitisation and Scientific Enrichment of Classical Archaeology Photographs

The University of Strasbourg has a rich collection of more than 12,000 archaeology photographs dating back to the second half of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. This corpus is part of a wider Lehrapparat constituted by Adolf Michaelis (1835–1910), who was appointed as the first classical archaeology professor at the newly created Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität in 1873, and his successors. During his tenure, Michaelis was granted substantial sums of money that allowed him to buy not only photographs but also projection plates, books, pottery, and other objects, including a series of plaster casts reproducing Greek and Roman sculpture masterpieces. Purchases of this kind were not uncommon at the time, but the Strasbourg collection is particularly rich and well-preserved and constitutes the core of the Adolf Michaelis Museum located in the main historical building of the university, the Palais Universitaire. The photographs, furthermore, are not especially unique, since they were bought from photographers who produced and sold complete series to universities for teaching and research purposes. However, when the digitisation project started in 2014, it appeared that many of them were not present in other digital libraries and, therefore, were unavailable to a large audience, having often been lost or destroyed over time. Working in close collaboration, librarians and researchers selected 854 items that were digitised by the University Libraries’ digitisation workshop.^[4] According to researchers, these documents provide interesting information on the history of famous archaeological sites such as Delphi, Corinth, and Pompeii. They show what the sites looked like at different periods and how they evolved. Some of them even have a kind of artistic dimension, such as the view of the aqueduct of Claudius in Rome reproduced with a woman wandering among the ruins (Figure 1). This blend of artistic and scientific value was important in the selection of the corpus.

The goal of the project was not only to bring little-known documents to the attention of researchers but also to make these documents accessible to non-specialists. To do so, digitisation was only a first step. Owing to funding from the Ministry of Research and Higher Education and the university itself, we were able to hire young researchers – master’s or doctoral students – and ask them to describe the pictures as precisely as possible. This scientific enrichment took the form of short explanatory texts added to the Dublin Core records of the digital documents (records that were originally created by librarians). Among many other examples is a view of the Acropolis in Athens printed in 1881 but first captured by the photographer Paul Baron des Granges around 1860 (Figure 2).^[5] The Acropolis is markedly different from what we know today, not only because modern buildings are scarcer but also because the aspect of the ruins themselves has changed. As the short text enriching the record states, the Frankish Tower (Tour franque) and parts of the wall surrounding the site were destroyed a few years after the picture was taken. This information confirms the dating of the photograph while providing useful indications on how the site was excavated and developed over the last 150 years. Mediaeval remnants such as the Frankish tower were erased in the 1870s to restore the Acropolis in its antique aspect.

The same can be said of many other photographs, such as those depicting the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, which represent the ruins as they could be seen around 1910.^[6] The current state of the monument is considerably different: six columns have been reerected on one of its sides, which shows the progress of restoration work over time. On the contrary, other monuments do not seem to have changed significantly, such as the Temple of Pallas in Corinth (Figure 3). However, the steps leading to the remains of the peristyle have been excavated or rebuilt since the picture was taken 150 years ago.

In some cases, pieces of information are missing: sometimes, the photographer remains unidentified, whereas in other instances, the date of the cliché cannot be determined for sure. Nevertheless, even when data are incomplete or uncertain, the pictures provide valuable insights into the history of the sites. The next step will be to make greater use of these documents by uploading them on Wikimedia Commons and using them to enrich existing Wikipedia pages. This step will be completed by the end of 2025.

The collaboration between researchers and librarians has proved fruitful for several reasons, the deployment of complementary skills being one of them. Librarians have not only digitised documents but also created corresponding metadata. Researchers have helped them determine which metadata are relevant and given them bibliographical advice. Researchers have also recruited competent master’s and doctoral students to enrich records. Both librarians and researchers shared a common conception of open access: one of the main goals of the project was to present this little-known research material to the scientific community and the general public. However, the project has had some shortcomings. First, the funding was insufficient to finish the project: though all the pictures have been catalogued, not all of them have been scientifically enriched. The young researchers employed for the task signed temporary contracts that were too short to allow them to finish the job, and the senior researchers did not have time to take over. Although the faculty of history supported the project, it was never considered a top priority, such that personal relationships between librarians and researchers were paramount to moving the work forward. When one of the researchers involved left the university to pursue a career at another institution, it became very challenging to continue at the same pace. Finally, the online distribution of other materials, such as the rich collection of archaeology glass plates held by the faculty, did not take place. The lack of financial means played a part in this situation, but this issue was also because the projection plates had begun to be valorised through other channels, namely by a professional photographer working for the faculty as a permanent employee. In this context, overcoming a feeling of competition between the two projects proved more difficult than expected. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, the work accomplished remains highly satisfactory.

The Digitisation of Art History Projection Plates

The University of Strasbourg has a collection of 20,000 projection plates purchased between 1890 and 1940, both by the German professors of the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Universität and by their French successors. Most of these documents are not unique since they belong to series produced by specialised firms which sold them to universities and other higher education institutions. However, like the archaeology photographs, the University of Strasbourg’s art history glass plates collection is probably one of the richest in France, if not the richest, thanks to the vast sums of money devoted to the constitution of Lehrapparäte during the German period.

The digitisation of this corpus was a much larger project than the previous one. It took almost two years, between 2019 and 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic and the successive lockdowns in France at the time slowed the pace, but two employees of the University Libraries’ digitisation workshop devoted most of their time to the project. The result is also available on Numistral.^[7] The idea of digitising this collection came from two researchers who had worked on the subject. At the outset, there was some deliberation between two strategies, namely whether to digitise the entire collection or to focus solely on a selection of plates. Many documents are reproductions of masterpieces that are well-known and well-documented elsewhere, even if some pictures show them in states that are not necessarily their current ones, especially when they have undergone restoration work since the photographs were taken. Digitising only the rarest items, such as views of local buildings that do not exist anymore or have been altered over time, could have been a solution. However, the researchers argued that the digitisation of the whole collection would allow them to better understand how their predecessors taught art history; which works seemed paramount to them; and which place each specific form of expression – painting, sculpture, and architecture – occupied in their teachings. Moreover, the comparison between projection plates and various documents, such as course programmes, could provide highly useful information.

Thus, the decision was finally taken to digitise all the 20,000 glass plates. Because of the number of documents, librarians only created basic metadata far less developed than for the archaeology photographs, and researchers asked master’s students studying art history to complete them. The University Libraries were able to finance two internships, but the other students who worked on the corpus did it as part of the courses they were taking, as their teachers considered the project to be an opportunity to train them in the identification and description of iconographic documents. This pedagogical aspect of the project was quite important and proved successful.

Digitisation was accompanied by an improvement in conservation conditions. Before 2019, art history projection plates were stored in a damp and dusty basement in worn-out boxes. The funding provided by the university allowed us to clean them, buy new boxes and pH-neutral paper envelopes, and move them into correct storage rooms. Moreover, the researchers involved organised a conference on the topic of projection plates and published its proceedings (Borlée & Doucet, 2019). Digitisation, therefore, happened alongside scientific and pedagogical achievements.

In this case as well, however, some shortcomings exist. Despite the commitment of researchers and their students, only 3,000 records have been enriched so far. Most items still only include the basic metadata (i.e. title, author, inventory number) originally created by librarians. Once again, the sums of money allocated by the university were relatively generous, especially in the context of controlling or reducing public spending, but they were insufficient to finish the project. The collection of projection plates is now available to the public, which is noteworthy, but not in the way it was imagined at the beginning of the project. Specialists can find interesting pieces of information when consulting them, but non-specialists likely feel slightly lost in this vast quantity of documents.

Conclusion

Based on the experiences described above, it is important to emphasise four key points essential for the success of digitisation projects based on the collaboration between librarians and researchers. The first one is the notion of complementarity, both in terms of competencies and expectations. It may seem obvious, but researchers will not be implicated if digitisation is not useful to their teaching and/or scientific activities. This remark means that corpora, metadata, and other elements must be determined collaboratively. The second point concerns the existence of a common vision of open access: in Strasbourg, for instance, other digitisation projects failed after researchers refused to disseminate primary sources on which they were working, such as corpora of photographs and projection plates, because they wanted to retain a form of exclusivity on these documents, even though this position was contrary to the university’s open-access policy. The third point is the question of temporality. Researchers’ and librarians’ temporalities may easily differ; researchers, who need to publish on several topics to advance in their careers, may move to other subjects before the projects they initiated are completed. The third point leads to the fourth one. The selection of ‘reasonable’ corpora is essential. Projects must not be too long because funding may be generous in the beginning but may also rapidly disappear.^[8] The French context is likely not an exception: the development of project logic in the last 20 years makes it relatively easy to initiate new actions and considerably difficult, if not impossible, to extend them over the long term.

References

Abstract

In recent years, Strasbourg University Libraries have digitised thousands of heritage documents bought by academics and services between 1880 and 1940 both for teaching and research purposes. Among them, two specific corpuses have been gathered within the framework of a close cooperation between librarians and researchers: the first one is composed of 854 archaeology photographs dating back from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. The second one is composed of roughly 20,000 art history glass projection plates from the same period. This paper discusses what proved effective and what did not, highlighting the challenges encountered and the solutions applied. Librarians’ and researchers’ expectations are not necessarily the same; their temporalities may also differ; yet common grounds can be found in order to preserve and reinterpret heritage collections.

Keywords

Corpus; Digitisation; Heritage collections; Librarian-researcher collaboration; Metadata enrichment; Numistral; Preservation; Teaching apparatus (Lehrapparat)