Special Collection: WHAV
Since 1991, research materials mainly from third-party funded field research in South and Inner Asia have been collated and archived in the Western Himalaya Archive Vienna (WHAV), University of Vienna.
In the beginning a pure image archive with an emphasis on art historical research (with a stock of more than 75,000 slides), the WHAV could increase its collection with numerous other visual media (eg. analog and digital photographs, negatives, maps, architectural plans and drawings).
The (WHAV online archive and database)[https://whav.aussereurop.univie.ac.at], which was developed from 2003 onwards, was originally conceived for the digital archiving and assessment of the analogue image stock, but in the course of time it was increasingly enriched with native digital material from ongoing research. The structure of the database closely reflects the structure of the physical, on-site archive at the Department of Art History, and is therefore organized mainly by geographic regions. Since our aim was to make the research documentation available to the users as quickly as possible, the grade of data quality varies widely.
The revision of data entries and the clarification of the licensing models for the individual contributions is an ongoing process, in the course of which the WHAV's image sets will be integrated into the HAV péu a péu. The media and collections of the WHAV presented here, show recently updated or newly released data.
