Established in 2013, PHAROS was founded to unlock the extraordinary visual and documentary resources preserved in art-historical photo archives, much of which has traditionally remained unpublished and accessible only through on-site consultation at individual institutions. For generations, these archives have served as indispensable laboratories for art historians, curators, conservators, collectors, and art dealers, preserving photographs, annotations, correspondence, and other documentation that record the evolving history of these objects as well as the development of the discipline of art history.
To realize this vision, PHAROS member institutions are systematically digitizing their photographic collections, integrating related archival records, and enriching these resources through LOD and shared metadata standards. They are also employing emerging technologies, including computer vision, artificial intelligence, and semantic knowledge graphs, to improve discovery, establish meaningful connections across collections, and reveal relationships that would be difficult to identify through traditional catalogs alone. Through these collaborative efforts, PHAROS is transforming previously isolated institutional archives into an interconnected, international research infrastructure, making these remarkable collections more accessible while enabling new forms of scholarship through the artresearch.net discovery platform.