Retrospective digitisation in research and teaching

Michael Gasser is the Head of the Collections and Archives at the ETH Library. He studied History and English at the universities of Basel and Edinburgh. After working for several years in the private sector, he moved into the world of libraries and archives. Since 2006, he has held different managerial positions at the ETH Library. His main responsibilities are the ongoing digitisation, opening up, use and networking of content and data from memory institutions.

Andreas Kirstein is the Deputy Director of the ETH Library. He holds a Master of Business Process Engineering and for several years has been the Director of the Corporate Services section, focusing on process and IT management for the digital library.

After studying history and completing his doctorate at the University of Zurich, Rudolf Mumenthaler was Head of the Special Collections at the ETH Library from 1997 to 2009 and Head of Innovation and Marketing from 2009 to 2012. During this time, he initiated the e-rara project, among others. From 2012 to 2017, he was Professor of Library Science at the HTW Chur (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Graubünden), from 2017 to 2020, he was Director of the ZHB Lucerne and since 2021 he has been Director of the University Library of Zurich, which is currently under set-up.

Sonja Gasser works as a Research Associate and doctoral student on the Digital Humanities programme at the University of Bern. She began her doctoral thesis, “Visualization and Communication of Digitized Collections of Art – Visual Culture at the Intersection of Art History and Media Technology” while studying digital art history at LMU Munich. From 2017 to 2020 she was a research associate in the Graphics Collection at the Kunsthaus Zurich and from 2011 to 2016 she was an assistant editor at Springer Basel. As the project manager for “Archives on the move – visualisation and communication strategies for digitised collections: access to the Kunsthalle Basel photo archive” at the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Basel, she collaborated with the Kunsthalle Basel between 2015 and 2018.

Since 2019, Tobias Hodel has been Assistant Professor with tenure track at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg at the University of Bern. He represented the State Archives of the Canton of Zurich as part of the EU project, READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents), that influenced automatic handwriting recognition. At the University of Zurich, Hodel coordinated the e-learning project “Ad fontes” and led the digital editing project “Königsfelden”. He has taught at the universities of Basel, Bern, Lucerne and Zurich. In 2016, Tobias Hodel completed a doctorate in History at the University of Zurich with a thesis on storage methods at Königsfelden Monastery.

Julien A. Raemy has worked in the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Basel since February 2021, where he is working on the Sinergia Project, “Participatory knowledge practices in analogue and digital image archives”, financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF), as part of his doctorate. Previously, from August 2017 to January 2021, he worked as a research and teaching assistant at the Haute école de gestion de Genève (HEG-GE) in the Information Science department. During his Bachelor’s degree, he worked as a photo archivist for the Montreux Jazz Digital Project at the Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Julien A. Raemy also works with the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) as a member of the IIIF Technical Review Committee, and with the Archival Resource Key (ARK) Alliance in their Outreach working group.