News 
The time has come for the watch industry to make archives available on the Internet. Three complementary projects are currently working together to make archives far more accessible: Arc horloger and its referral portal, The Watch Library and Chronospedia.
The Arc horloger project was born in the wake of the December 2020 inclusion of the skills related to the craftsmanship of mechanical watchmaking and art mechanics on UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Its mission is to unite the custodians of these skills as well as to promote the continuity and passing on of these practices through various safeguard measures.
Among the actions planned was the creation of a referral platform for documentary resources in the Franco-Swiss Jura Arc. In recent years, a systematic inventory has been made of the institutions concerned: archive and training centres, museums, associations and federations. As a result, a directory has been compiled, providing an overview of 33 locations storing watchmaking and art mechanics archives. It has recently been integrated into the Arc horloger website (arc-horloger.org), on the interactive map of the Jura arc, where it can be freely consulted.
Supported by The Watch Library Foundation, created in September 2021 and recognised as a public interest organisation, the platform (watchlibrary.org) has been inviting visitors to explore the history of the watch from 1650 to the present day since 1 September 2023. Resulting from several years of research, collation and digitisation of watchmaking-related archives, it currently encompasses over 330,000 documents and archive pages from museums, libraries, magazines and private collections in Switzerland, France and abroad. While the current archives are in French and English, they will soon be complemented by documents from the four corners of the globe, including Asia.
At the end of January, The Watch Library revealed on its website the first ten years of a rare and major watchmaking archive: La Suisse Horlogère, published from 1948 to 1978. The other years will follow in the coming weeks.
Chronospedia (chronospedia.com) is developing an open-access digital database thanks to its collaboration with some 40 organisations, currently in France and Switzerland. It will bring together knowledge relating to clocks and clock towers designed in Europe between 1300 and 1900. The first elements are already online and its gradual incrementation is due to continue through to until 2028.
The project’s DNA lies in the use of 3D to safeguard and promote watchmaking mechanisms, even though technical data sheets, lists of breakdowns, bibliographies and museum archives will eventually be available for each family of mechanism. Chronospedia’s close cooperation with the world of higher education and research will enable data to be archived over the long term and visualisation tools to be made available in virtual reality, augmented reality and other processes in the vanguard of technological innovation.
These three projects were born of the conviction that watchmaking heritage and notabaly archival heritage represents a vital resource: an inexhaustible reservoir of knowledge that is capable of stimulating the imagination, creativity and innovation. Until recently, however, this documentation was hard to access and the exclusive preserve of just a few specialists, historians and researchers.
February 15, 2024