Hanau Media Center

The memory of the city

The Hanau Media Center supplies schools, local associations, publishers and citizens.

“With easydb the visual memory of the city is made visible.”

Philipp Gubelt, head of the media center for the city of Hanau

Summary

Challenge: Archiving for the future

The media center of the city of Hanau has an inventory of 350,000 images, dam it one of the largest municipal image archive in Hesse. Until 2008, all stocks were managed analogously. An enormous amount of work. In order to streamline internal processes and avoid high upfront costs for research, a sustainable solution should be found to digitally archive the images. When switching to a digital system, numerous detailed questions arose that had to be solved. Programmfabrik GmbH was awarded the contract with its web-based archiving solution easydb.archive .

Solution: easydb.archive

There were only six months between the award of the contract and acceptance. The central challenge was the specifications. Here the essential specifications were defined and the course for the project was set. The fact that the State Media Center of Baden-Württemberg, a customer with similar requirements, was already using easydb made the work easier. Over 15,000 images have now been digitized. An inventory that is constantly growing and is integrated into easydb.archive .

As part of the school administration office, the media center's mission is to develop visual media and document and archive the city's history. In addition to local associations, publishers and private individuals, the city's 28 schools also use the images for teaching. So far, research requests have been processed internally by employees. The next step is releasing it for public web research. The watermark function allows images to be researched and made available in higher resolution after approval by the image provider.

Since the regional home aspect is very important in the Brothers Grimm City, the geodata module is another instrument with which historical images can be displayed about their location in the map view in the future. Other city administration departments also manage their own image inventory using the same mask via different pools.

Case study as PDF