CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
The ISA Archive comprises the visual legacy of renowned social anthropologists, such as wM (Full Academy Member) Walter Dostal, the multimedia documentation of ethnographer Werner Finke, and a photo database of South Arabia (wM Andre Gingrich, wM Walter Dostal, Johann Heiss). The visual material consists of many thousands of slides and negatives, audio tapes, films, notebooks, manuscripts for lectures etc.
In various self-financed and third-party funded research projects, the materials are digitized in high resolution, indexed, made accessible online via the AAS catalogue and archived long-term via ARCHE. The images are described using a thesaurus based on the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM), a subject classification system of social and cultural life first developed by G. P. Murdock and colleagues. The OCM is used to subject-index eHRAF World Cultures. With permission from HRAF, this subject classification system has been adapted by ISA. Here you can download a PDF with the vocabulary in which the ISA adaptations are marked.
If the rights were transferred to ISA, for example by donation (Werner Finke) or bequeathed by last will (wM Walter Dostal), the photographs are published under the Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Some images cannot be published online for ethical or copyright reasons: photographs of illustrations, maps etc. whose copyright could not be clarified; for the protection of the persons depicted from political persecution; for the protection of children; damaged photographs; test photographs; amongst others. If you would like to access them for scientific purposes within the framework of research requests, please contact sozialanthropologie(at)oeaw.ac.at.
Selected materials from Werner Dostal’s Yemen photographs will be published in “Kulturpool” in the fall of 2024 (funding program “Kulturerbe Digital” of the Austrian Federal Ministery for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport) as well as in the Academy Catalog (repository of the Austrian Academy of Sciences). Werner Finke’s photo documentation of life in the Kurdish settlement area of Turkey will be published in the academy catalog as well as on a curated project website later this year (FWF PEEK project AR 682 “ZOZAN – Investigations on Mobility through Multimedia Documentation”).