2012-2015

Museum Director Per Karsten
Lund University Historical Museum
University of Lund


Project title
The older collection of negatives at Lund University Historical Museum
The object of the project was to scan those photographic negatives from the collection of the Lund University Historical Museum, which concerned its medieval section. This collection is of a very large capacity and valuable as both an archaeological and historical source material. The project was initiated about a decade ago, but was interrupted as a result of a lack of funding. One fifth of the entire collection was scanned, but the bulk of that material concerned the prehistoric section. Therefore the main object of this continuation of the scanning project was to focus on the medieval section, mainly consisting of photographic documentation of medieval churches from about 1900. The material has previously been used to a limited extent but is an invaluable complement to the medieval collections of the Historical Museum.
1. By the end of the project 3466 glass plate negatives had been scanned. The initial estimation to scan 7200 negatives during one year soon proved impossible, without seriously lowering the technical quality of the images. In the older project a very low resolution was used, which had the advantage of saving time. In this new project however we chose to use a very high resolution, which has the disadvantage of being more time consuming.
After an initial cleaning of the negative, it is scanned. After that it is packaged in an acid free envelope. The scanned image is given a number and is technically corrected, for instance to correct levels of exposure to light. Finally the image is also saved in a somewhat lower resolution, which is used in the search module being used by the museum, called MuseumPlus. As a result the scanning process is rather time consuming. The project was also initiated by a learning period of one month, in order to learn how the scanner and the program Adobe PhotoShop worked. Because of the limited amount of time it was soon decided that the project should focus on those pictures which were deemed to be of the greatest interest to the scientific as well as the public community.
2. The project has generated several new questions. For instance many of the old negatives give clues as to where the religious objects, as well as furniture, previously were placed within the parish churches. Furthermore most of the interior images from around the year 1900 showed a remarkable lack of medieval objects, considering that most churches nowadays generally has some medieval objects, either in the church or kept at the Historical Museum in Lund. The minimalist interiors of that age may be explained by consulting the archive at the Museum. As the museum made an inventory of medieval objects in the Scanian churches in the year 1914, it was made clear that they had for the most part been placed in the attics or in adjacent storage facilities, and as a result were in very bad conditions. Because of that a large portion of them were delivered to the Museum in 1914, where they have been displayed ever since.
3. Andreas Manhag, who was the participant of the project, attended an international conference in Trondheim, Norway, in 2014, called Religion and Money. The conference was primarily focused on numismatics and medieval sculptures and therewith related archaeological finds. Manhag, together with Gitte Ingvardsson, held a lecture which focused on religious and archaeological objects from the Cathedral of Lund, and their gradual dispersal during the 19th and 20th Centuries. In that context several newly scanned glass plate negatives, discovered during the scanning project, proved invaluable.
4. Collaborations with institutions other than the scientific community has been of an utmost importance. The scanned material has been made available to both scientists as well as the public in the newly created archive, which is a collaboration between the University of Lund, the Cathedral of Lund, and the National Archives of Sweden. Scientist from the academic community, architects and the general public has already shown a great interest in the new archive and the scanned photographic negatives, which through this project has been made more available.
5. The project was carried out without any major technical problems. In the initial phase the scanner broke down and a new one had to be ordered, which delayed the project somewhat. However, the time lost for scanning could instead be used for other work within the project, such as reformatting of images and transfer to the system MuseumPlus, as well as adjustment of images in Photoshop.
6. The scanned material is stored at the server of the University of Lund in a very high resolution, which can be used for publications, and in a lower resolution, as used in MuseumPlus. The latter system is used on a daily basis by the staff of the Museum, scientists, students and the public. In that way the scanned material becomes a crucial part within the public archive which has been created in collaboration between Lund University, the Cathedral of Lund and the National Archive.
A large portion of the much needed digitalization of the photographic negatives of the Historical Museum has been made possible by the generous contribution from Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Hopefully the last remaining portion of the collection may be also be scanned in the future.