Kronofoto is an open source tool for managing small to medium-sized digital photo archives involving a chronological/historical theme. It originated as a web-based digital asset management tool used to host and administer Fortepan Iowa, a digital archive of high resolution amateur photos of Iowa and Iowans taken over the past 150 years. Fortepan Iowa, launched at the University of Northern Iowa and presented at HASTAC 2015, is a collaboration between three different departments, across four different disciplines: public history, computer science, visual communication, and photography. Kronofoto is the technology that enabled this multidisciplinary endeavour: while still a prototype, it was successfully utilized to build an archive consisting of more than 5,000 photos contributed by more than 150 local Iowa donors and processed by 165 students. This paper showcases the first public release of Kronofoto, as well as the lessons our team has learned through managing a digital archive over the past year.
We focus on three key aspects of Kronofoto: browsing facilities, functionality for scholarly use, and interoperability with other repositories. Kronofoto offers a choice of browsing interfaces including chronological, geospatial, and faceted navigation, thus enabling visual exploration of the archive in a nonlinear manner, which is essential for scholarship in the humanities. The functionality designed for scholars includes image annotation and custom image subsets; image URIs provide for image citing and sharing, as well as embedding in blogs and web pages. Finally, Kronofoto implements the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) APIs designed to facilitate reuse of image resources across digital image repositories maintained by cultural heritage organizations.
The ultimate goal of our team is to provide the digital humanities community with a simple tool for building and showcasing digital archives like Fortepan Iowa. We hope Kronofoto becomes that tool.
