Digitized Photographic Material from the National and University Library on the Digital Library of Slovenia Web Portal: An Overview

Irena Eiselt

Review of the National Center for Digitization, Tome 25 (2014) no. 1.

Résumé

The Map and Pictorial Collection is one of the special collections of the National and University Library of Slovenia. It holds about 65,000 units of photographic materials dating from 1850 to the 21st century (i.e. negatives and positives with different motifs - portrait, documentary and landscape photographs, and on different formats such as carte-de-visite and cabinet cards). Approximately 12,000 digitized units of the Map and Pictorial Collection available via web portal the Digital Library of Slovenia (dlib.si) represent 95% of all photographs available on this portal until the present time. Photographs in different sub-categories or sub-collections can be found in the Portrait Collection of Famous Slovenians, the Virtual Exhibitions and in the dLib.si Collections. The quality of work in the Map and Pictorial Collection significantly improved after digitization of photographs (i.e. to enable more prompt delivery of requested material to end users, better preservation of invaluable photographic material, wider access, etc.). The main aim of this paper is to give an overview of the Library’s digitized photographic material available on the dlib.si portal, and to present advantages and disadvantages of such materials.