Discover your attic treasures with knowyourcarrier.com
26 Apr 2023We all have old photo negatives scattered around in drawers, or forgotten prints in the attic. You might even have some more exotic photographic carriers, which you don’t even know how to identify, let alone what they’re called or how best to store or digitise them. But now there’s a single address – knowyourcarrier.com – where you can go to learn all about your photographic finds and their heritage value, and how to store and digitise them, all at once. So it’s easy to future-proof your photo materials in just a few clicks.
Knowyourwhat?
Knowyourcarrier.com might already sound familiar to you – this online identification tool has been helping people to recognise images and audio from their (personal) archives since 2018. Now, in addition to audio cassettes and film reels, knowyourcarrier.com can also help to unravel photographic mysteries on Polaroids and glass negatives. Research among our content partners has shown that Flanders is sitting on a mountain of photographic materials: from old cityscapes to intimate family moments and images of large or even very small historical events. These are all unique testimonies of our history that could easily be lost without any intervention. Knowyourcarrier.com can help to safeguard these precious treasures for now and in the future, so that we can continue to share them with our and future generations.
Knowyourwhy?
Safeguarding heritage for current and future generations begins with identifying what you have in your possession. With knowyourcarrier.com, we’re aiming to help anyone who wants to sustainably preserve their audiovisual and photographic carriers. The first version of the identification tool – which focused on audiovisual materials – won the prestigious FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Award for ‘Excellence in Media Preservation’ in 2019. Expanding the tool to also include photographic materials was inevitable: Flemish archives are full of photographic collections that are often very vulnerable. The GIVE project has now made this expansion a reality, and we can gather together all our knowledge about images, sound and photography in one central location in an accessible way.
Knowyourhow?
With knowyourcarrier.com, we want to share knowledge in an understandable way, so that heritage professionals and inexperienced users alike can get started with it straight away. If you have a carrier that you want to identify, just follow these simple steps:
Go to knowyourcarrier.com.
Click ‘Would you like to identify your material?’
Answer a few simple questions based on photos and descriptions.
Click through to the results page – et voilà! The tool tells you what you have in your possession and provides a brief history and some technical specifications.
Knowyourcarrier.com provides simple storage and digitisation tips together with contact details for several professional digitisation companies to help you complete your carrier digitisation journey. To find out whether your materials have any heritage value, the tool also refers you to Flemish heritage organisations that can guide you further.
The advice we provide on knowyourcarrier.com is the result not only of knowledge that we have gained ourselves over the years, but also from experts in the field. This includes support and expertise from FOMU (Fashion Museum of Antwerp), erfgoedcellen.be, University of Antwerp, Nederlands Fotomuseum, D/Arch, Sabine Cauberghs and Johan Swinnen.
The expansion of knowyourcarrier.com to also include photographic materials was made possible with support from the ERDF (European Research Development Fund), as part of the Flemish Government’s Resilience Recovery Plan, and is part of the GIVE project (Coordinated Initiative for Flemish Heritage Digitisation).
