The ‘Digitale Diathek’ unites the most important partners in the field of university image databases in the disciplines of art history, design history, history of photography, film studies, architecture and urban planning, archaeology, history studies, religious studies and other disciplines that involve the study of images, in the framework of an international association. The basic aim of this scholarly and institutional collaboration is to achieve synergistic usage of scholarly skills in the participating universities and research institutions, taking into account each institution’s main areas of emphasis in terms of methodology and content, in order to make available to partners of the a future-oriented and efficient tool for mutual usage of digital image, audio and video materials in research and teaching work. The ‘Digitale Diathek’ is developing the scholarly, technical and legal prerequisites for inter-university collaboration through this association. It is developing and operating the infrastructure required for collaboration between the participating universities and colleges.

The users of the ‘Digitale Diathek’ are the participating institutions and their researchers, teachers and students who wish to use digital image, audio, and video material from the disciplines of art history, design, history of photography, film studies, architecture and urban planning, archaeology, history studies, religious studies and other disciplines that wish to work with images in their research and teaching work. The association’s limited public access is in the interest of ensuring the scholarly quality of the content and is accompanied by applicable usage agreements with the relevant national royalties collection societies under copyright law. Partial and targeted access to the databases for individual partners of the association for publicly accessible holdings and archives is permitted within the framework of copyright agreements.

The ‘Digitale Diathek’ is jointly supported and financed by the partners of the association. Cooperation is regulated by corresponding legal agreements. Costs arising beyond the operation of the multimedia and picture databases are kept to a minimum, thanks to the distribution of installations among participating databases. The realization and positioning of the association were made possible thanks to the kind support of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Zurich and the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich.