About
The Open Archive Portal Network is an internationally federated network based in Geneva, Switzerland that represents open archive portals across the world. The aim of OPAN is to promote and defend our shared values, exchange best practices between our members and resolve fundamental issues about public historyportals.
Our Mission
To Preserve
To Preserve
To Preserve
OPAN members digitally preserve thousands of vernacular historical photographs, audiovisual materials, and other pieces of private history. We all started these initiatives separately to fill a clear public need that wasn’t being met by established institutions in our country. We are driven to save “private” or vernacular history that wa
OPAN members digitally preserve thousands of vernacular historical photographs, audiovisual materials, and other pieces of private history. We all started these initiatives separately to fill a clear public need that wasn’t being met by established institutions in our country. We are driven to save “private” or vernacular history that was being ignored by the GLAM (Gallery, Library, Archive, Museum) sector.
To Organize
To Preserve
To Preserve
We organize digitized artifacts by place, time, and theme. We have all designed mapping, timeline, exhibit, and navigation platforms that organize cultural heritage in a way that makes sense to users. Emerging independent of GLAM institutions and innovating outside of typical archival channels, we are making thousands of incredible piece
We organize digitized artifacts by place, time, and theme. We have all designed mapping, timeline, exhibit, and navigation platforms that organize cultural heritage in a way that makes sense to users. Emerging independent of GLAM institutions and innovating outside of typical archival channels, we are making thousands of incredible pieces of private history publicly available through
easy-to-navigate public portals.
To Share
To Preserve
To Share
Our goal is to celebrate local history and the stories of everyday life; to ignite public memory through local photos, audiovisual recordings, and documents. We aim to promote sharing on many levels. Most of us are involved in Creative Commons licensing and see value in being part of the CC movement. We don't see the point of locking pub
Our goal is to celebrate local history and the stories of everyday life; to ignite public memory through local photos, audiovisual recordings, and documents. We aim to promote sharing on many levels. Most of us are involved in Creative Commons licensing and see value in being part of the CC movement. We don't see the point of locking public memory away. And now we aim to share what we have learned with each other. Please feel free to join us.
Our Members (in alphabetical order)
AJAPAIK (Estonia)
The Ajapaik portal is a non-profit venture of the Estonian Photographic Heritage Society (MTÜ Eesti Fotopärand) that was created during a Garage48 hackathon in February 2011. The project supports 1176099 historic pictures and encourages users to geotag pictures to improve the location metadata, rephotograph historic photos to create then-and-now picture pairs, identify people in photos, categorize and comment on photos, and add historical imagery to Ajapaik – either by searching and importing from public collections or through uploading private collections.
AZOPAN (Romania)
The Azopan photoarchive is based in Romania. The portal aims to preserve and publish the analogue photographic heritage of Romania. The collection’s goal is to make the millions of analogue photographs hiding in drawers, shoeboxes, and warehouses, or those that only exist only as a negative, available to the public. We are busy every day to find and digitize new photographic pieces of our shared heritage. The collection is based on the work of volunteer editors and is intended for everyone. Anyone can participate with their own old photos. Any picture that meets editorial requirements can be added to the collection. Thank you to the individuals, amateur and professional photographers who entrusted their photos to us and have allowed us to publish them. Photos in the database are published under the Creative Commons 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
ENTERRENO (Chile)
Enterreno is a cooperative portal based in Chile. Our site is currently under construction.
FORTEPAN (Hungary)
Fortepan is a community-based photo cooperative portal with nearly 200,000 curated historical photographs available for anyone to browse and download in high-resolution, free of charge. The images--mostly from Hungary but including many other places--are licensed to the Creative Commons (3.0 International) and are free to share with the appropriate credit given as FORTEPAN / NAME OF DONOR. This portal was launched in 2010 by Ákos Szepessy and Miklós Tamási and initially contained photographs found randomly in the streets of Budapest. The archive has expanded through donations from families, amateur and professional photographers, and public collections. The images on the website are selected by editors. Descriptions attached to the images are compiled and edited by volunteers, utilizing information contributed at the Fortepan Forum.
FORTEPAN (US)
Fortepan US is a networked cooperative portal that supports the preservation, sharing, viewing, and use of family and local historical photographs from the United States. Drawing upon the power of place, the Fortepan US platform encourages family contributors and cultural heritage institutions within a single U.S. state or other entity (like an Indigenous territory or U.S. national park) to join digital forces and unite the historical photographs/cultural artifacts in their holdings through a single interface.This “digital first” platform inspires cultural heritage institutions to rethink digital archiving practices by making local historical documents more accessible. Our inspiration (and name) comes from the Fortepan project based in Hungary.
HISTORIA HELVETICA (Switzerland)
Historia Helvetica is an archival consortium connecting historical photos from five Switzerland regions together: Notre Histoire, UnsereGeschichte, LaNostraIstoria, Nossa Istorigia, and GeneveMonde. We created the cooperative portal--which supports Photos, Audio, Video, Testimonials--to enable the public to publish their own audiovisual archives (photos, films, audios) and combine them with a selection of documents from heritage institutions, including the archives of Radio Télévision Suisse. Other institutions (museums, libraries, etc.) soon joined the project. We aim to create a shared feeling for the lives of individuals and give them recognition as part of the collective memory of our region (French-speaking, German-speaking, Italian-speaking Romansh-speaking and International Switzerland). We thrive on the possibility for each person to give their own story a place in a collective history, and the prospect of finding an echo, an understanding. Over time, the public has made the platform their own, and is the driving force behind its activity.
MAGNA ŻMIEN (Malta)
The Magna Żmien project was set up as a grassroots movement in 2017, advocating for the digitization and preservation of unique home audio-visual collections to form a community archive accessible to researchers and artists.During the twentieth century, the world began to capture events of everyday life on film and tape. The Maltese were no exception, recording moments of family life, society, language and identity on photographic film, 8mm film and audio-tape. Today these artifacts and their content have become part of our intangible heritage. Magna Żmien set out to salvage Maltese memories that lay neglected and deteriorating on their original analogue carriers, freeing them from obsolete playback formats by converting them to digital files. We give individuals and communities access to previously lost images, sounds and narratives. This content is shared on our platforms and through our activities, preserving it for future generations, while being careful to credit and respect the wishes of the donor. We believe that all the material that we gather in our archive is part of our shared heritage, and that this heritage must be properly cared for.
PAMMAP (Slovakia)
Memory of Bratislava (PamMap) is a project that aims to access the history of the city to the lay people and professionals in the modern-digital form. Its objectives are to establish a comprehensive memory portal which it brings together academic texts with digitalisation diverse of historical sources of the history of Bratislava (starting with the oldest archaeological discoveries through old documents, more recent image materials with postcards and photos to the latest audio and video memorials memories of the recent decades). The portal is meant for the general public but thanks to specialists (historians, archivists etc.) it has the ambition to be both specialized portal with scientific use. PamMap is available to general and professional public digitization of historical sources of the historic city in the low resolution (usually 100 dpi). People who are interested in professional outputs (usually 600 dpi) can contact the owners / managers of sources (example. museums, archives as well as private owners) that they can decide according to their own rules. The portal is still under the construction and the structure and the content will be gradually improved.
PASTVU (Russia +)
Our team was motivated to start PastVu out of the desire to preserve the historical context on a single map and timeline. We also wanted to bring together images of the same place that had never been seen together in another situation. And we wanted to combine widely known photos and personal testimonies of a bygone era. We are based in Russia but photos on PastVu offerlobal coverage. We prize community contributions with a local history knowledge. We are run entirely by volunteers and rely on the crowdsourced tagging of more than 134.000 registered users. Together, these many volunteers have uploaded more than 1.7 million photos. We also operate a regional moderation system, with currently 90+ moderators. The open source purpose-designed platform allows anyone to suggest a feature, report bug, contribute code, i.e. get involved in development.
TOPOTHEQUE (Austria +)
Topotheque is a platform which makes local, historical relevant material and knowledge, that is kept in private hands, accessible online, in cooperation with the local population. As an online archive, operated in local entities, a "Topotheque" is an regional historical source of reference, focusing on not only preserving historical material kept in private hands but making it visible to the public. Topotheques already exist in a number of different European countries. This allows for a comparison of regional historical conditions on a European level, making the diversity and common grounds of every-day life tangible. As a virtual collection, the Topotheque is easily expandable and doesn´t have to comply with editorial deadlines or page limits. The main aim of the Topotheque is to make the historical heritage of Europe digitally available via the Internet – in accordance with up-to-date indexing one can finde image or file content sorted by: key words, date and perspective on the map.
