To manage the technical aspects of the digitization, the Watch Library is to work with Arkhênum, the company that Europa Star used to digitize its own archives.
Global horology archive#
“We can develop solutions depending on the archives in terms of volume, or fragility.”Īs examples of collections she would like to include, she cited the archives of the International Watchmaking Museum in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, as well as the personal archive of Louis Cottier, an independent watchmaker in Geneva who, in the early 1930s invented the mechanism at the heart of Patek Philippe’s World Time watch. There is no one solution for everyone,” she said. The digitization could take place wherever the archive is, “or people can send the archive to Geneva or Paris. Vivas wrote in an email.įor now, the foundation has set its sights on including the analog archives of museums, horological societies and other institutions “with a large view of watchmaking, open to everyone,” Ms. “As an historian, it would be a dream to have instant access to so many primary sources, to establish facts, to understand context, to challenge myths, to solve controversies, to discover unknown facets of our history,” Mr.
Global horology free#
Of the 2.5 million Swiss francs (about $2.7 million) it says are needed to build the digital platform, most of which will be free to access, the foundation has raised almost half thanks to patrons including Audemars Piguet and Richard Mille. Depresle, who serves as the foundation’s managing director, said it received its accreditation from Swiss authorities in mid-February and was seeking more sponsors. Maillard joined forces with Martine Depresle - founder of the Talented, a Swiss consulting firm, and the former communications director at Vacheron Constantin - to create the Watch Library Foundation. It was a little-known anecdote about how the famed watch designer Gerald Genta left a 1984 Geneva watch exhibition “in a huff,” according to the article, because the show management had asked him to remove his whimsical Mickey Mouse and Pink Panther watches from display. Maillard referred to a story he discovered in one of the nearly 200,000 pages that Europa Star had digitized thus far as an example of what website users might uncover using its search feature. “But it also generated some frustration because it was just a tiny drop in the horological ocean.” “It was very moving for me because it was like my ancestors coming back to life,” Serge Maillard said on a recent video call.
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