Photo archives around the world

Overview of national library photo collections

Abstract

The author describes the creation and history of the Historical Photo and Video Collection of the National Széchényi Library (NSZL), and in order to explore the paths of its development, she visited the websites of several national public collections to assess international trends. It is examined what they consider their mission in the field of visual documents, whether they have a separate collection of photographs, what types of photographs they hold and what criteria they use for collection development. She consulted the British Library, the Library of Congress, the French, Canadian, German, Norwegian, Austrian, Spanish and Romanian national library sites for information and, where this was not enough, asked the heads of the photo archives, Jill Delaney of the National Library of Canada and Michaela Pfundner of the Austrian National Library, for help. In the last third of the article, the author gives an overview of the photo collections in Hungary, analysing their relationship with the Historical Photo and Video Collection of the NSZL.