Digital Film Collection Literacy – Critical Research Interfaces for the "Encyclopaedia Cinematographica"

For some time now, there has been a desire to elevate film to the status of a scholarly publication, and thus to recognise it as a research product in its own right. Never before has this dream seemed so concrete: analogue film collections are extensively digitized and made reliably referenceable via permanent links (DOIs). However, there is often a gap between the digital present of collections and their (analogue) history – such as in the case of the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC). The EC was a large-scale project of exceptional duration and scope (1952–90), conducted by the Institute for Scientific Film in Göttingen (IWF). The EC was intended as an encyclopedia of movement processes, comprising more than 3000 films from biology, ethnology and the technical sciences. In 2010, the IWF was dissolved and the collection was transferred to the Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover (TIB), where the majority of it was digitized, and certain sections were made accessible online. The challenging layering of media, histories, technologies and institutional agendas that the EC presents as a research object demands various “literacies”, but also specifically designed research tools. The SNSF-funded research project “Visualpedia” (2022–2026) is dedicated to the question of how to appropriately activate and research such a collection entangled in the logics of archival digitization and digital library organization. In addition to a historical reappraisal of the institution and collection, various interfaces are being developed within the project to activate the collection with regard to different research questions. As part of the group presentation, we would like to provide insights into the research project and the interfaces developed.