The Hamburg "Bildindex" is a research instrument giving a keyword approach to the political aspects of the arts and their history. It can be compared to the systematic catalogue of a library indexing images instead of book titles. It contains about 300.000 cards with reproductions of works of art, short texts and other material; furthermore, it is accompanied by a specialized book collection, rare historical postcards and the "Archive for Art of the East German Republic" in the Seminar of Art History at Hamburg University.

The main interest of the index is to give an overview of the forms, functions and ways of reception of visual objects for political communication in history and to draw the attention to new fields of research. Therefore its thesaurus does not content with art history's terminology but also includes keywords of social or political sciences and introduces new descriptions for the phenomenons of the arts used as a carrier of political messages and ideas. Sometimes also the objects of christian or classical iconography are to be reinterpreted within the framework of political iconography.

The quality of the image cards reflects the scientific function of the index. In most cases the cards show b/w-photographic reproductions from books and catalogues, besides postcards or Xeroxes, indicating other (or better) sources for illustrations, naming the places of the original art work or listing further titles of scientific literature. In the near future the computer will enable the users and archivists to combine the different forms of information and to produce multiple keywords for any object of the index.