TIB membership in the ICONCLASS Consortium
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TIB has been a member of the ICONCLASS Consortium since April 2025. The Consortium was founded in July 2024 to ensure the long-term operation and further development of the free online service through membership fees and input from the community.
What is ICONCLASS?
ICONCLASS is a classification system for image content. It is used in art history and collection documentation to describe the iconography of pictorial works in a standardised form.
Screenshot of the ICONCLASS website:
https://iconclass.org/Developed back in the 1970s by Henri van de Waal and published in printed form, the system only found its true purpose with the establishment of computer-aided cataloguing. With the increasing importance of Linked Open Data – i.e. publicly accessible, standardised linked data on the web –, the benefits of ICONCLASS, which is machine-readable thanks to its alphanumeric ID system and can be used in any language, are growing once again. The online service is available free of charge via the ICONCLASS browser or via open interfaces. In terms of iconography, it is the only one of its kind.
ICONCLASS browser with classification of Heliodorus in the temple:
https://iconclass.org/71Z31Like the thesauri of the Getty Institute, ICONCLASS is one of the terminology standards for digital cataloguing in the GLAM area Bereich (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), but has no comparable resources in the background. The Consortium was set up to ensure the continued operation of the service and to fulfil the requirements of the rapidly growing community. Members are invited to help shape and further develop the service, while also gaining access to newly developed plus features such as the AI-supported image search, an enriched bibliography or deep links to museum objects with corresponding classification.
ICONCLASS at the TIB
ICONCLASS is used both in the cataloguing projects of the special collections (GESAH and GESAH+) and in Task Area 1 of the NFDI4Culture.
GESAH+
The classification is used in practice to describe the prints in the Albrecht Haupt Collection, particularly those depicting Christian or mythological scenes. One example is the depiction of the Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple: While the famous fresco created by Raphael for the stanze of Pope Julius II in the Apostolic Palace in Rome (1511) has been given a reference record in the GND, it is only possible to classify the Old Testament episode as a pictorial theme via ICONCLASS (in this case: https://iconclass.org/71Z31). Registered users are shown image examples with this classification in the ICONCLASS browser. This is particularly helpful in identifying or verifying rare image themes. The plus feature of the AI-supported image search is also a new and particularly helpful tool in this respect if it is not possible to enter the search on a linguistic basis.
Pieter de Balliu, after Raphael, The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, engraving, Antwerp 1654-1660, TIB Hanover, Coll. A. Haupt, inv. gr I GR M 3: 5 (
https://sah.tib.eu/individual/n8110)
NFDI4Culture
In order to improve the standardisation of subject indexing in the collections, i.e. to facilitate the enrichment of individual indexing data with authority data Task Area 1 of NFDI4Culture, which is based in the TIB Open Science Lab, has developed the annotation tool Antelope. The tool provides options for querying standardised data services, thesauri and classifications – including ICONCLASS – in a bundled manner in order to make the image descriptions available as Linked Open Data.
Last but not least, a bonus that Consortium membership brings for all TIB employees and users: Both registration with ICONCLASS using a TIB email address and login from the TIB network allow access to the plus features (after prior registration with any email address). This means that access to helpful image examples for the classifications is permitted and deep links to the linked collections and information on related bibliography are provided. In addition, the image recognition function can be used to retrieve similar images together with their ICONCLASS notations.
ICONCLASS classification in TIB SAH digital:
https://sah.tib.eu/display/n5749The ICONCLASS team will be happy to answer any questions you may have about using ICONCLASS and is offering virtual “guided tours” to provide further information.
#AlbrechtHaupt #Collection #ICONCLASS #linkedOpenData #LizenzCCBY40INT
TIB
Birte Rubach
Sammlung Albrecht Haupt
