ABSTRACT
The Warburg Institute is one of the primary centres for iconology in the world. A core part of its collections is a photographic collection founded by Rudolf Wittkover in 1930. This collection of 400,000 images is arranged thematically by iconographic subject in approximately 18,000 subject folders. A significant proportion, around 40,000 images, has been digitized in a number of projects over the last ten years.
The database itself is an in-house production, designed and implemented in mySql using Php scripts written by the Deputy Curator of the Photographic Collection. Inevitably this presents problems of metadata interoperability: the database, and its metadata, is not compatible with community standards and so cannot be shared with others, wasting much of the scholarly work that has gone into its creation.
This chapter will detail a project to convert the database and its metadata from its current form to a fully interoperable, standards-based platform. The project involves detailed analyses of the functions of the database, the creation of new data models and their translation into interoperable formats such as METS, MODS and IIIF.
