ELIA’s rare archives digitalized
The Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive (ELIA), in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture, has taken up a European Union initiative titled «Information Society» and secured 1 million euros’ worth of funding for digitizing some 84,000 archival items, such as photographs and postcards, journals, magazines and newspapers, as well as music scores and programs from theater performances and film screenings. All the material, which belongs to the ELIA collection, is original and dates to the 19th and 20th centuries. Most of it will also be made available on ELIA’s website, allowing access to researchers both in Greece and abroad. Digitizing this rare archival material is both a way to ensure that it is never lost or destroyed and means that the material can be studied more extensively, by more people and in more detail. A group of academics has been assigned to sort the material into thematic units so that they can then be published individually on DVD. One of these projects, perhaps the most important, has been undertaken by photography scholar Alkis E. Xanthakis. Titled «Photographers – Greeks and Foreigners – Active During the 19th and 20th Centuries, 1839-1960,» the project is a compilation of the work of an impressive 3,300 artists. Xanthakis, however, is confident there is material still missing from the collection and calls on the relatives and friends of photographers who were active before the 1960s to submit new information.
