From Analog to Digital: What Happens When a Historic Film Archive is Stored Electronically?

Recently, several projects have been dedicated to transferring film collections into the digital world and hence, some significant online-databases such as Europeana.eu have been created. However, it has hardly been examined from an epistemological point of view what problems and questions evolve when trying to (re-)contextualize film collections in online-databases and what happens to all the data connected to the films. Based on the history of institute for the scientific film (IWF) I will show some of the questions, problems and needs of a film archive being digitized. Founded in 1956 as a successor of the Reich Institute for Film and Images in Science and the Classroom (RWU), the IWF provided a broad range of films dedicated for the use of researchers and scholars. One of the most significant collections was the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica (EC) which was seen to be the leading part of a world archive for all dynamic processes: humans, animals, plants and machines alike. Leading ethologists and biologists like Konrad Lorenz and Otto Koenig were involved in the institute’s film projects. With the headquarter in Göttingen (Germany), the IWF sought to expand into a world wide network of scientific films. After the institute closed its doors forever in 2010, questions of digitalization and long-term-archiving of the films became relevant and are even more so discussed today. This contribution to the panel connects the spheres of media history and the history of science and asks for the specific role of film as historic and material source.