15 years E-Pics Image Archive Online
Our oldest image catalogue on E-Pics celebrates its 15th anniversary! It took a lot of preparatory work, numerous attempts and the courage to try something new before the catalogue could be launched on 6 March 2006.
With over 560,000 images, the E-Pics catalogue Image Archive Online is the largest and oldest catalogue on our platform for ETH Zurich’s images. But how did digitised images come to be made freely available to the public in the first place?
Beginnings within the framework of a first pilot project
As early as 1997, the ETH Library started to work on digitising images and recording them in an electronic image database. This was at a time when e-journals, digital parallel editions of printed scientific journals, were just beginning to establish themselves and the World Wide Web (WWW) was still in its infancy. A pilot project on the one hand was to enable better administration and more sustainable use of the originals, and on the other hand, as a network, to test the joint offering of the images via the Internet. The ETH Library’s first steps in this direction were met with great interest.
Foundation of the physical image archive in 2001
On 1 March 2001 – exactly 20 years ago – the ETH Library’s Image Archive was officially founded. The collections of views, portraits and slides, which had hitherto not been maintained as a priority, were combined with the newly acquired holdings of the photo agency Photo Comet AG. This was followed by the organisational set-up as well as the extensive development of know-how not only in the library field, but also in the field of a digital image archive with a view to digitisation. Instructions, procedures and standards on various aspects were developed and tested in practice. Continuous recording in the image database introduced in the pilot project showed first successes with almost 28,000 data sets at the end of the first year of operation of the image archive.
E-Pics introduced as ETH-wide project
E-Pics (originally EPICS – ETH Picture Information System) was finally launched as a project on 3 September 2001. The platform was to be centrally managed by the ETH Library and accessible to all ETH users via web browsers. In a first step, an interface for the web and the search engine were created for the existing image database. Thus, for the first time, images could be searched and ordered, and lecturers could easily compile images for their lectures.
Launch of Image Archive Online 2006
It soon became clear that the requirements and necessary performance could no longer be met by the existing technical system. In a new project phase, a new technical solution was sought and a suitable partner was found in Canto's Cumulus software. One of the biggest challenges proved to be the import of the 60,000 data sets that had been recorded in the previous system. Finally, on 6 March 2006, Image Archive Online, the first E-Pics image catalogue with around 20,000 data sets including images, was launched. A milestone!
Would you like to learn more about the history of the Image Archive Online?
On our blog Crowdsourcing, we are publishing the history and development of the Image Archive Online in three parts to mark the 15th anniversary of the image catalogue (German only). In the first part, read more about the prehistory and the first digitisation and database attempts, which date back to 1997!
As a visual memory, the ETH Library’s Image Archive has extensive and valuable holdings of more than three and a half million historical photographs. A large selection of them has been digitised. You can search the images on E-Pics Image Archive Online or in external pageETHLibrary@swisscovery.