I recently had a talk with Frank Nikolaus Golomb, CEO of United Archives in Cologne, Germany – one of the archives we are currently partnering with. United Archives really lives up to its name, housing
numerous prestigious photo collections like International Film and Television News/IFTN, Press Image Agency-
Browers, KPA Photo Archives and many more. We are happy and excited about this cooperation!
So, Mr. Golomb, thank you for agreeing to me asking a few questions, here we go!
How come you decided to go for the decision to have your photo collection digitized?
Well, the business is digital and we look at several million images from history and retro. With our capacity, we
can never digitize everything we have in a lifetime. But cooperation with IMS helps us to be faster. We sell
originals in our gallery at 1stdibs.com, but it´s honestly a slow process and we decided to leave this area and
focus on our core business.
How will you use the digitized archive?
We use it in our database for the editorial market. If the necessary rights are available, we can license the images.
Does the digitized collection open up new opportunities/ideas for you?
Since 2012 we work with the European Union and their cultural portal Europeana and ingest or link content to
this portal.
The Handelsblatt Archive, which we delivered to IMS, stayed at the Berlin-based German Historic Museum
from 1998 until 2018 as an archive, covering images of more than 40 years of Economic history of the world..
The publishing house Handelsblatt donated this collection to the museum in 1998. In 2018 we took over this
archive from the museum and the ownership of this archive was given to us.
I think that this archive as a whole is a cultural heritage, which of course is more accessible in digital form.
My plan is to link this archive to Europeana, when the digitization process is finished on your end.
Niklas Blomkvist
Photography & Creative Director