Fine Art in Florence - A User Profile Fine Art in Florence - A User Profile
Described as the oldest photo archive in existence, the Alinari Archive is arguably the most important picture library in the world owning a collection of over two and a half million images originating from all over the world. First established in 1852, this historic collection has steadily evolved over the last hundred and forty years to become the highly regarded and internationally recognised visual resource that it is today.
The major collections that make up the total Alinari archive are: Alinari, Brogi, Anderson, Fiorentini, Mannelli,Sommer, MacPherson, Mollino, Villani, Balocchi, Wulz, Beato, E.S. Curtis. The archive embraces a wide spectrum of content but mainly consists of: portrait, landscape, cityscape, architectural, transport, industrial, fashion, still life and fine art subjects.
The archive is housed in a magnificent setting in the heart of Florence (Firenze) and features a collection which includes over 400,000 unique glass negatives and vast numbers of rare vintage prints (albumen, collodion, ambrotypes, gelatin, etc.). Sixty-five percent of these images are black and white, the rest are in colour.
In the last three years, the Alinari Archive, under the direction of Andrea de Polo, has been planning and managing the migration to a digital management, search and delivery system with the ultimate goal of making a substantial proportion of the Alinari Archive available through on-line services. The project, called 'Alinari 2000-Save our Memory' undertaken in partnership with specialist integrator Finisiel, aims to provide on-line images for the educational, academic and professional users. The images are watermarked using Signum Technologies' software tools and compressed with Live Picture's FlashPix™ compression tool.
As from December this year, 15,000 images will be available via the Alinari Web site and will be searchable through a sophisticated bi-lingual database, in conjunction with 'Picasso', a state-of-the-art, visual retrieval image similarity engine developed jointly with the University of Firenze.
Andrea de Polo's principal objective was to build a carefully considered and fully integrated end-to-end system to capture, catalogue, manage, administer and deliver the Alinari content. The nature of the archive material has meant that many of the system components have had to be designed to Alinari's exact specification such as the image capture rostrum which is designed to deal with valuable and highly fragile film, plates and prints in a wide variety of formats.
Wherever possible though, Alinari has specified off-the-shelf hardware and software and the system is based around high-specification Apple Macintosh and Digital computers. Not suprisingly, Photoshop and LivePicture are the favoured image editing applications at the front end with Querysis as the database engine.
In parallel with their own project, Alinari has also worked closely with the Imprimatur e-commerce project as the principal beta test site. This EU funded project was tasked with defining and building an operational e-commerce transactional model for providers of content. In common with other content-based business models, watermarking is viewed as playing an important supportive role in protecting intellectual property rights and monitoring the use of content.
Early on in their own project, Alinari too concluded that it would be essential to incorporate invisible watermarking tools into their system to help protect their valuable content. After much testing, primarily to establish the impact that watermarking had on image quality, SureSign from Signum Technologies of Cheltenham, England was selected by Alinari as being best suited to high quality images.
Standard SureSign public-key software tools were specified and built in. These were recently upgraded to the latest version which includes a new algorithm specifically designed to protect Web images.
"Until now, Alinari was very worried about data security and protecting our valuable photographic images on the 'Net. Since we adopted Signum's SureSign watermarking technology, I sleep a lot better. We feel very comfortable with the various solutions that are now offered by Signum," Andrea de Polo commented.
He continued, "Thanks to Signum, the way we operate has changed dramatically. Today, we are in the process of digitising and watermarking over 1 million images which we will undertake over the next few years - a major project that just a couple of years ago could not be considered at all, because of the lack of an effective protection system."
The two companies enjoy an excellent on-going alliance which has recently resulted in some pioneering work on fingerprinting FlashPix™ image files.
For more information about one of the most important picture libraries in the world please take a look at the or contact:
Andrea de Polo
Director of Conservation and Technology
Tel: 0039-55-2395201 Fax: 0039-55-2382857
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