Thank you for agreeing to do this interview Tobias, and I start by asking you to tell the readers about your archive please.
We have a huge analogue archive consisting of around 50 million slides, photographic prints and plates, from for example Expressen, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, SVT- Swedish Television, Pressens Bild, Bonnier archives (former Åhlén & Åkerlund). We have around 1200 metal cabinets full of photos in the basement of our Marieberg location, Stockholm.
How come you decided to go for the decision to have your photo collection digitized?
Since it costs to have all these images stored in a space, on top of being expensive and time consuming to scan all the images (which itself would be impossible considering the volume) we became interested when IMS suggested digitizing parts of the archive.
How will you use the digitized archive?
We let you digitize the collections that are most interesting for us – and from these we select images for availability on our website. This means we can decrease the storage space and place physical images in the cabinets that are now emptied.
Does the digitised collection open up new opportunities/ideas for you?
It´s obviously interesting for us and our clients that the images become digitized and made available for publishing instead of being kept in files located in the basement. It would be interesting to digitize more of the physical archive but since we don´t own all of the content ourselves we need to discuss this further with the owners of the material we store.
Thank you very much Tobias, I appreciate you took the time to answer my questions.