Pharos -International Picture Archives Federation

PHAROS is an international consortium of 14 European and North American art historical photo archives dedicated to creating a digital research platform to provide comprehensive and integrated access to photo archival images and their associated scholarly literature.

PHAROS was founded in 2013 to meet the need for the rich visual and textual materials in art historical photo archives, which are often unpublished, and to make them uniquely accessible through these repositories to a new generation of scholars accustomed to accessing research materials online. Comprehensive access to tens of millions of images of artworks will be of inestimable value to scholarship and teaching on a wide range of art historical issues. These include provenance and attribution, conservation studies, exhibition studies, publication history, history of photography, as well as art history. Most importantly, PHAROS aims to provide an essential resource for those engaged in new research methods within the framework of the digital humanities.

Brief History

At the first meeting, with funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the directors and staff of the research institutions responsible for 14 major photo archives in Europe and the United States prepared a statement of purpose outlining long-term and short-term goals. Since the first meeting, a technical working group determined that the most promising solution to achieve unified access to the approximately 31 million artwork image files held by the PHAROS institutions was to map the data to the CIDOC CRM ontology and convert it into Linked Open Data (LOD) to ultimately contribute to ResearchSpace. From 2014-2016, with funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Pharos worked with John Resig, the creator of JQuery and the chair of the Computer Science Department at Kahn College, to create an image recognition tool for the consortium’s Italian images, similar to the one he had created for Japanese woodblock prints. The PHAROS Art Research Database, launched in September 2016, enables users to search their own images against images in the PHAROS database and find multiple images of the same artwork from multiple photo archives, along with accompanying documents, with image-to-image searches without the need for language mediation.

Current Status

As of Fall 2016, members are at various stages of converting historical documentation of artworks into electronic form, coordinating relevant data with agreed-upon authorities, mapping data to the CIDOC-CRM ontology, and digitally capturing all of their photographs. As these steps are completed, the images and data will be available in the Computer Vision Database as well as in ResearchSpace.