The autumn of 2012 saw the launch of the unique Daguerreobase international project, with the support of the European Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP). The aim of the project is to create an extensive database of daguerreotypes, daguerreotype equipment, contemporary reproductions, publications, and other related historical material from public and private collections in Europe. The database, which by the end of the project in March 2015 will contain more than 25 000 records of objects in various European collections, will be accessible to all those who are interested from among the specialist and broader public. In this way a key tool for research into and knowledge of this pioneering era of photography will be created, which will be available not only to specialists in the field of photographic research, but also to those who are interested in other academic disciplines, and which will in addition help protect one of the oldest photographic techniques. Preserving daguerreotypes and spreading knowledge about them is all the more urgent in that every daguerreotype, unlike all other types of photograph, is in principle unique.
The Daguerreobase project was initiated by the museums of photography in Antwerp and Rotterdam, and a number of other leading European institutions are involved in it, such as the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Det Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen, and the Atelier de Restauration et de Conservation des Photographies de la Ville de Paris. The main partner of the project in the Czech Republic is the National Technical Museum in Prague.
The role played in the project by the Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, will consist in the assembling, processing, and scholarly evaluation of data about daguerreotypes in Czech collections and their subsequent inclusion in the database.
In January 2014 the first meeting of potential contributors to the database took place in the National Technical Museum in Prague. The programme included presentations on the history of, and research into, daguerreotypes and daguerreotype collections in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and Serbia. A paper on the daguerreotype in the Czech Republic was presented by Petra Trnková, a research worker at the Institute of Art History and a member of the Czech coordinating team for the Daguerreobase project.
In February 2014 a new version of the database was launched at www.daguerreobase.org Records can be added to it there by private owners and the administrators of public daguerreotype collections.
Contact person at the Institute of Art History: Petra Trnková, PhD. – ptrnkova@gmail.com
