Turkey's cultural inventory to be digitized

It is now possible to digitally access Turkey's history of cinema, theatre, opera, television shows, politics, education and advertising.

People who sign up to the Fine Arts System's website, created by the National Library of Turkey, will be able to access the Non-Book Materials Branch Office's collections. The collection features local and foreign visual and audio materials on culture and art.

The organization gathered the collection via compilations, donations, purchases and exchanges. Collections such as paintings of canonized Turkish painters, historical maps of strategic value, stamps, and postcards will soon be put into service for researchers on the web site.

The system will also enable users to have copies of the materials in exchange for a small fee. The system builds a bridge between 1923 and today through the most extensive film poster collection of Turkish theatre and cinema. The poster collection, which has been gathered by art lovers together with the exhibitions, was enriched with 11,646 additional posters.

The collection currently has 19,705 posters that feature commercial, political, advertising and educational activities as well as congresses and conferences. The collection also has the poster from the first Turkish film in color, "Halıcı Kız" (The Carpetmaker Girl), as well as early period productions and unforgettable films of Yeşilçam (the old Turkish film industry).

Phonograph records of local and foreign artists, collected by the Library between 1913 and 1960 have been uploaded to the system. The collection is comprised of nearly 5,000 songs in mp3 format.

Five-hundred-sixteen original paintings made by oil, watercolor, drawing and mixed color technique are also on the Fine Arts System.