Filling a Void: New Digital Preservations Initiatives Around the World to Preserve and Share Vernacular and Family Photos
Andras Török Bettina  Fabos Claude Zurcher
Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums have had little interest in preserving the photos from family collections. How interesting then, that in the past decade, numerous independent initiatives in at least ten different countries have organically sprung up to fill this void. In every case, it's a small team, even a single person, whose passion for local history and archival photographs, and knowledge of web development, has led them to digitize historical photos, develop digital heritage portals, and create communities revolving around local history and collective memory. These cooperative history portal initiatives are surprisingly technologically innovative–offering sophisticated timeline, mapping, geolocation, crowd-source tagging, search/exploration, public discussion, and photo-matching tools that allow people from a particular place or country to explore historical photos most relevant to them, and to add their local expertise. These initiatives are also refreshingly innovative in terms of user experience and aesthetics, and have much to teach digital preservation communities about increasing and enlivening public engagement with historical photos. 
This panel presentation will present ten examples of cooperative photo history portal initiatives that have emerged independently in ten different countries:  Austria (Topotheque), Chile (Enterrano), Estonia (Ajapaik), Hungary (Fortepan), Israel (Dokuforte), Malta (MagnaZmien), Romania (Azopan), Russia (Pastvu), Switzerland (NotreHistoire), and USA (Fortepan US). Until recently, our projects have been doing synchronized swimming in parallel pools. However, we have recently found each other through various Creative Commons and individual outreach initiatives, and we decided to hold our first consortium meeting in summer 2023. Since then, we are meeting regularly and have created OPAN–the Open Portal Archive Network (https://opanglobal.org). Our goal is to share our practices and experiences, build open source sustainable code (to share), find other similar initiatives in other countries, raise awareness of the interest and importance of private family archives and the history of everyday people, and create a mosaic of open portal archives to preserve and make publicly available the world’s vernacular photos. 
We hope to present the myriad ways in which our individual efforts are inspiring people to engage in shared public memory, and find ways in which the digital preservation community can benefit from our work.
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