Karin Sidén, Nationalmuseum

The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm is the home of a world-famous collection of drawings for architecture, gardens, applied arts and ephemeral decorations. It traces its roots back to the first Superintendents (överintendenter) of Royal building works and consists of around 15 000 sheets. Young architects in the Superintendent's office acquired numerous drawings while travelling and studying on the continent, in particular in France and Italy. Their purchases have made the collection an important part of European heritage, often quoted in international scholarship. The collection of architectural drawings, which includes works from the 15th to the early 19th century, consists of four historic collections: the Tessin Hårleman Collection, the Cronstedt Collection, the Celsing Collection and the Eichhorn Collection, the two former ones being largest and most important.

The object of the project has been to photograph the entire collection digitally, write basic catalogue entries and make the images available for study through the museum database. Further, in a limited number of problematic cases, the project has provided solutions for inadequate storage.
The ambition has been to give access for users to files large enough to permit studies of details. Both in the cases of accessibility and permanent storage, a shared solution with the rest of Nationalmuseum is the most rational and obvious choice. Thus, no separate web database for the architectural drawings has been created. The project staff has been: Dr Helen Evans, paper conservator; Cecilia Heisser, photographer; Ola Svenle, architect; and Dr Martin Olin, project coordinator. In charge of the project have been the directors of research Karin Sidén (until January 2012) and Magdalena Gram.

Results

The project conservator embarked on the project three months before the photographer and the project assistant were hired. Out of the two large subcollections, the Cronstedt Collection has been the most neglected, and therefore it was chosen as the initial project target. Evans consequently began by performing a complete inventory of the approximately 5400 items in the collection, noting their storage place, format and catalogue number. In the process, she discovered that several hundred drawings lacked inventory numbers. Most were extremely fragile so-called tracings, on paper that had been made translucent with oil before being used to copy other drawings by tracing. The tracings were numbered and mounted in new plastic pockets that fix and protect the occasionally fragmentary sheets. When Evans had thus obtained a reasonable overview of the storage of the four sub-collections included in the project, 1000 drawings were selected at random for a condition survey. The selected items were then evaluated according to four criteria: general condition; the suitability of any existing mounting; the need for treatment within the scope of the project to prepare them for photographing; and finally, an estimation of the time required for any such treatment. Further results are presented in Evans 2009 (see list of publications).

All in all, our conclusion from the condition survey was that the four sub-collections (Tessin-Hårleman, Cronstedt, Eichhorn, Celsing) each have different characteristics, preservation problems and treatment needs. A large part of the Cronstedt collection, for instance, had been damaged by rats and mice when it was kept at Fullerö. This type of damage is practically non-existent in the other collections. Around 15% of the entire collection of architectural drawings, or some 2900 sheets, was deemed in the condition survey to have damages requiring treatment. These damages consisted largely of dirt and discolouring that do not prevent the drawings from being handled or photographed, and treatment for this was not carried out within this project. However, 193 drawings were considered to require conservation or mounting before they could be photographed, and Evans carried out the necessary work.

A work station for digital photography has been set up in the prints and drawings storage in the Nationalmuseum building, where the photographer Cecilia Heisser photographed the entire Cronstedt collection, a total of 6205 subjects (the collection has 5400 inventory numbers, but many sheets have drawings and inscriptions on the verso etc). In the Tessin-Hårleman Collection, she took 4320 photographs. Each raw file (NEF) was converted into a TIFF file of approximately 130 MB, the image was colour adjusted and retouched and saved in three sizes (16 bit TIFF, 8 bit TIFF and JPEG). After that, they are ready for both the image database and for printing. The files are named according to their catalogue number, which was double- checked against each respective drawing and the project assistant's records. The catalogue number in two versions and the IPTC was incorporated in the metadata of the image file.

The project assistant, architect Ola Svenle, has continuously catalogued the drawings awaiting photography in an Access database. The entries are based on the information in the handwritten inventory from the 1940s-1960s, but the information is extended to include an English title, topographical data and subject categories. This is a preliminary step towards making the open database searchable.
During the winter 2012-2013, the migration of the Access-database to the Nationalmuseum's database MuseumPlus has been prepared. First, the entries were transferred to a test version of the database, where problems could be observed. The final migration took place on 21 March 2013. It resulted in 10 404 new entries for the category architectural drawings, of which 8574 included one or more images. The total number of entries in this category (including already existing posts, for which new images are provided by the project) is now 11 650. This is less than the 15 000 which was set up as the goal of the project. This must of course be regretted, and it should certainly be a future priority to complete the registration of the Tessin-Hårleman Collection.

Unforseen technical and methodological problems

The unforseen problems included the cost (and the administrative responsibility) for permanent storage of the large number of image files on a server. Further, photographing the drawings took longer time than estimated, partly because of their fragility in general, partly because the photographer needed to take more than one photograph per drawing in many more cases than we had thought. The latter was motivated by drawings or inscriptions on the versos, alternative solutions on attached pieces of papers etc, and, importantly, by the circumstance that drawings in large formats had to be photographed in several parts and that combining the digital files to a full view was very time-consuming.
In the last phase of the project, the technical challenge has been to transfer the project entries to the museum's database and to link the image files. This has taken place under the supervision of the museum's database manager assisted by the supplier Zetcom. There have not been any serious technical problems, but around 1000 entries were excluded from the migration because data, such as certain inventory numbers, have been entered in formats that were not accepted. A further 1000 entries were excluded for safety reasons since entries for those drawings already existed (mostly without images). In all these cases, modifications need to be made manually. The research department has undertaken to finance this work, which will be performed during three months starting 15 April 2013. After the migration in March, it became evident that the relatively large image files that had been linked to the entries were not shown in their full size over the web database. This is, simply put, because of an automatic MuseumPlus restriction that we hope to adjust during 2013, after which it will be possible to study the larger files.
The reason for some of the technical difficulties mentioned in the section above is that the Nationalmuseum was in the process of changing its database when the project started. We have gradually adjusted to the new database MuseumPlus as it has been implemented.

Integration

The digital image files have been made available to museum's photo library. Also, we have been able to provide the necessary images for another research project in the museum (Anna Bortolozzi, "A Catalogue of the Italian Architectural Drawings in the Cronstedt Collection"). Access to the results greatly facilitates the ongoing inventory work related to the museum's restoration. The project has been presented in seminars arranged by the museum's research department.

New questions

Research questions have above all been related to, on the one hand, the state of preservation and remaining effects of the history of the collections (see Evans 2009), and, on the other hand, the history of the collections and their roles as sources and work material for the architects of the 18th century (see Olin 2010b and 2010c). It has been known that the superintendents exchanged or sold sheets to each other, but the relations between them have now been further clarified. To shed more light on the historical context of the collections, a conference, "Journée franco-suédoise", was arranged on 8 April 2011 at the INHA/ Centre André Chastel in Paris. On the French side, the initiative of Linnéa Rollenhagen Tilly has been of great importance, and she has contributed to the project through her studies of Carl Johan Cronstedt. Future research collaboration on the architectural drawings in the Nationalmuseum with French scholars would be very desirable. The results of the project have provided the necessary basis for such collaboration.

Link

www.nationalmuseum.se , see further Collections Online