The Challenges of Building and Maintaining an Image Database Because of the complex and multi-level nature of archival images, it is an ongoing challenge to establish a metadata architecture and metadata standards that are easy to navigate currently and take into consideration the users' future requirements. This contribution will present a use case from the material and visual side of the humanities based on the efforts of the Digital Research Archive for Byzantium (DiFAB), housed at the Department of Art History at the University of Vienna. Using the example of one monument and its photographic documentation, this talk will highlight some issues concerning metadata for images of material culture, such as: the various analog and digital forms of documentation; the use of available thesauri or other controlled vocabularies – especially problems of historical geography, multilingualism, and culturally specific architectural and iconographic terminologies –; and the importance of both precise and fuzzy dating for cultural historians and their research archives.

Metadata, e-infrastructures austria

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