Historical Postcards

Info

Data Set created: February 2019

Data Set updated: 17 May 2023

Content

Postcards from 1896 till 1925 showing places from all around the world.

Data Provenance and Quality

The postcards contained in this data set were digitized for the project Austrian Postcards Online (AKON

Ansichtskarten Online (picture postcards online). Picture postcard portal (and associated collection) of the → ONB; contains 75.000 digitized postca...

) between 2012 and 2014. TIFF

Tag(ged) Image File Format. Common file format with the file extension .tiff, used to store raster graphics and image information; suitable for st...

 masterscans of the postcards are stored as JPEG2000

Joint Photographic Experts Group 2000. An advanced image compression standard that provides higher image quality and more flexibility than tradition...

 in the ONB

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek. Austria’s largest library and a cultural and research institution located in Vienna; founded in the 14th century...

 data repository

Central storage location where digital objects such as documents, data or software versions are stored, managed and made accessible; often used for ar...

 and can be accessed as JPEG

Joint Photographic Experts Group. Commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, especially for images created by digital photography...

 via IIIF

International Image Interoperability Framework. Standardizes the provision of images and audiovisual data from servers in different web environments...

. Bibliographic metadata for the resources was edited in an relational database, containing among other attributes titles, place names linked to GeoNames

Freely usable geographical database. See https://www.geonames.org/

 as well as geolocations (latitude and longitude) and a boolean value for colored postcards. Both front sides as well as back sides of the postcards are digitized. Due to privacy reasons only front sides are available to the public. They are also accessible for exploration via the AKON portal, a user interface with a map as primary access point. We provide the images via IIIF plus metadatarecords for every postcard.

Historical Background

Postcards as a medium for communication were introduced in the Habsburgian monarchy in 1869, first without since 1885 with illustrations. Around 1900 colored postcards grew very popular, mainly based on lithography.

Maintenance

This data set can be updated irregularly.

  • 34846
  • Documents
  • 34846
  • Images
  • 34846
  • IIIF Manifests

Postcard showing a street view of Stavanger, Norway

Reuse

Information on Rights and Reuse

License

Cite as

ONB Labs: Data Set Historical Postcards, https://labs.onb.ac.at/datasets/akon/

Preview

Documents in the Data Set

Data Set Items

Historical Postcards12
NameEntries
All Historical Postcards34846
All Historical Postcards With Recorded Cities31068
All Historical Postcards With Recorded Buildings10203
All Historical Postcards With Recorded Mountains5575
All Historical Postcards With Recorded Water Bodies1776
All Historical Postcards in Colour7667
All Historical Postcards in Black & White27179
All Historical Postcards Photographed by Georg Angerer64
All Historical Postcards Photographed by S. Frank22
All Historical Postcards Photographed by F. Fuchs22
All Historical Postcards Photographed by Ferd. Hofbauer30
All Historical Postcards Photographed by J. Moretti21
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    Data

    Download and Access Options

    Sample

    • 30 selected postcards from different places
    • 30 JPEG files, 30 metadata records
    • Readme explanation of properties used
    • Zip archive (15.4 MB)

    Metadata Records

    • Bibliographic metadata for all documents
    • Readme explanation of properties used
    • CSV table (11.5 MB)

    IIIF Collection

    • IIIF collection with URLs to all images
    • 34846 images in JPEG format with metadata
    • JSON file format

    Code

    • Repository with scripts for processing AKON images
    • Jupyter Notebooks
    • Readme with requirements

    Use Cases

    Areas of Application Related to the Data Set

    Possible Uses

    The images in the data set could be used to train a CV

    Computer Vision is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) focused on enabling computers to interpret and understand visual information from the wor...

    /ML

    Machine Learning (ML) is a branch of artificial intelligence (→ AI) focused on developing algorithms and statistical models that allow computers to le...

    -model that is meant to be able to automatically recognize landscapes and places. Since the data set contains metadata to image documents, it could be used to gain an exemplary understanding of the distribution of places over time, and to therefore gain an insight into certain characteristics that might be present in the entire collection.