Lucerna – the Magic Lantern Web Resource

Lucerna is an online resource on the magic lantern. It includes details of slide sets, slide images, readings and other texts related to slide sets, lantern hardware, people and organisations involved in lantern history, and much more. The initiative for the Lucerna project came in 2005 from Ine van Dooren and Frank Gray (University of Brighton) and Ludwig Vogl-Bienek and Torsten Gärtner (Universität Trier) – both institutions are Associated Partners of A Million Pictures. In 2006, as part of a research project at Trier University, several thousand digitized lantern slides on social issues were viewed and an outline database design relating slides to their historical context was developed.
A Million Pictures takes the Lucerna database at a starting point and will further develop this web resource according to the needs of the various stakeholders. To date, Lucerna  proved not only to be a great tool for the documentation of slides from the perspective of researchers but also a useful way of documenting collections of small and medium-sized museums. Our partners at Royal Albert Memorial Museum Exeter (UK), for example, use the “collection” option to document their lantern slides.
Read more about the Lucerna database in our Newsletter #2.