Image archive of the Foundation Luftbild Schweiz

Completed project

Aim of the project

The preservation and protection of the photographs which are of historical and cultural value and of national importance

Description of the project

The Image Archive of the ETH-Bibliothek has taken over the photographic holdings of the Foundation Luftbild Schweiz. It contains around 100,000 aerial photographs of Switzerland from 1917 to 2011 as well as around 200,000 images from the Swissair Photo Archive.

Both archives contain various different storage media: glass plates, copies in albums and negatives and slides in various formats. A larger selection of photographs is to be digitized and saved on microfilm for the purposes of protection. As part of this work, all photographs are also being packaged to archival standards and stored in the best manner possible.

The metadata for the aerial photographs, which is already available, is being taken over and supplemented with ETH-Bibliothek indexing. In the case of some series of images, and this is particularly applicable to the Swissair archive, former Swissair employees are identifying and describing the photographs on a voluntary basis. These are gradually being made accessible to the public via the image database Bildarchiv Online (external link) and Google's images search function and can be used in accordance with the Terms and Conditions of the ETH-Bibliothek.

Synergies and Context

The project is being implemented with financial support from the following cantonal lottery funds:

Cooperation partners

Stiftung Luftbild Schweiz

Timeframe, sequence