Switzerland’s ETH-Bibliothek is uploading 134,000 images to Wikimedia Commons
134,000 images are being uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, a central repository for free media, from ETH-Bibliothek, Switzerland’s largest public scientific and technical library.
Most of the photographs are being drawn from their aerial photograph holdings (70,000 in all) and 40,000 from the archives of Swissair, the national airline of the country until its bankruptcy in 2002.
The first 18,000 uploads come from Walter Mittelholzer, a Swiss aviation pioneer and entrepreneur. In his travels, which included the first north–south flight across the African continent, he took thousands of aerial photographs from places as varied as Spitsbergen (1923), a Norwegian island in the Arctic Ocean; Persia (1924–25); Kilimanjaro, the dormant volcano in modern-day Tanzania (1929–30); and Ethiopia (1934). You can see examples of his work sprinkled throughout this post.
“Mittelholzer captured sensational aerial images of landscapes, many of which had never been photographed from a bird’s-eye view before,” ETH-Bibliothek project coordinator Michael Gasser said. Mittelholzer utilized these images in a series of popular books that chronicled his trips into the-then great unknown; today, his work is used in post-colonial research.
Other images being uploaded are historical photographs of ETH-Bibliothek’s campus in Zurich, along with portraits of professors, students, and scientists at the same location.
Gasser says that while all of these images are already available on the internet, ETH-Bibliothek is “facilitating access to these valuable image sources ... we are trying to bring the material to where the users are.” All are licensed under CC BY-SA or are in the public domain.
The project to upload them to Wikimedia Commons stems from a collaboration between ETH-Bibliothek and Wikimedia CH, an independent organization that works to advance the Wikimedia movement in Switzerland, which was initiated through mutual contacts at Open Data.ch, the Swiss chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation.
You can see the images for yourself as they are being uploaded on Commons. EE
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I had a brief glance thru the images in the "Mittelholzer-Abyssinia flight 1934" group, which by their name ought to be images mostly about Ethiopia. Since I've had a hand in writing the majority of the articles about that country, I'm probably as qualified as anyone to categorize them. What I found was while many of these could be valuable contributions, almost all need much more background information to be truly useful. For example, one of the first I looked at was labelled "ETH-BIB-Abessinier an einfachem Grab-Abessinienflug 1934-LBS MH02-22-0281.tif", which, as the title says, is a photo of a simple grave in Africa; however, there is nothing about the grave -- which is a simple wooden cross -- or the man sitting next to it with his head covered -- is he crying? Was the person buried there a relative? Or is he simply resting in the shade of the trees & has nothing to do with the grave? And then there is "ETH-BIB-Alte abessinische Wandmalereien in Kirche-Abessinienflug 1934-LBS MH02-22-0299.tif" -- a photo of a wall painting inside of an Ethiopian church. The style is clearly Amharic, & since it was taken before the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, this may be an image of a lost work of art that has been destroyed in the 80 years since. Yet all we know is what the title of the photo tells us. A third -- & stupidly frustrating -- example are several photos described as "Die zwei Töchter des Kaisers im Palastpark" ("Two daughters of the Emperor in the Palace Gardens"): which two daughters of the Emperor are these? Haile Selassie had four.
Interspersed with these "Abyssinian" photos are photos of adjacent countries: several of Petra in modern Jordan, some of Jerusalem, & some of Sudan. As a result, photos tagged simply "Markt im Abissinien" could actually have been taken anywhere. As I said, there are some potentially invaluable images here, but it will take a very long time to provide more than some simple & possibly unhelpful category tags for them. (I added one, which I suspect is wrong.) -- llywrch (talk) 22:03, 7 September 2016 (UTC)[reply]