ORI GIN AL PA PER

Archives, libraries, museums and the spell of ubiquitousknowledge

Thomas Kirchhoff Æ Werner Schweibenz Æ Jorn Sieglerschmidt

Published online: 25 September 2009� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract This paper describes the convergence of libraries, archives, and museums in

Germany from traditional brick-and-mortar institutions to a digital memory institution on

the Internet. An implementation of such a digital memory institution is BAM—the joint

portal of archives, libraries, and museums in Germany. BAM has the potential to serve as a

single point of access to existing, but separate offerings of the several branches of cultural

heritage, e.g. union catalogs, and a great number of separate digitization projects offering

their content on the German Web. BAM can make an important contribution to the efforts of

both the German governments (federal and states) and the European Union, which are in the

process of establishing portals to cultural content on the Internet. The article gives an outline

of the current undertakings and illustrates how the striving for ubiquitous knowledge

delivered by Internet portals relates to the scientific tradition of documentation in Europe.

Keywords Memory institution � Portal � Ubiquitous knowledge

Qui scit ubi scientia habenti est proximus.[He who knows where the knowledge is, is closest to having it.]

Digital convergence and the memory institution

One of the foremost indicators of digital convergence is the blurring of distinctions

between archives, libraries, museums, and other memory institutions in the virtual realm

T. Kirchhoff � W. Schweibenz (&) � J. SieglerschmidtMuseum Information System (MusIS), Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Wurttemberg,Universitat Konstanz, 78457 Constance, Germanye-mail: werner.schweibenz@bsz-bw.de

T. Kirchhoffe-mail: thomas.kirchhoff@bsz-bw.de

J. Sieglerschmidte-mail: joern.sieglerschmidt@bsz-bw.de

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Arch Sci (2008) 8:251–266DOI 10.1007/s10502-009-9093-2

(Besser et al. 2004; Sieglerschmidt 2006). From the users’ perspective, it is of no

importance ‘‘where they find their information, whether it is in a book or a leaflet in the

library, from a description of an artefact in the museum, or from an organization’s protocol

in the archive, as long as they do find it.’’ (Hedegaard 2003, p. 2). In the digital realm, it is

no longer relevant whether the original materials are in a library or a museum or an archive

(Kraemer 2001). This trend sets the stage for a new institution of digital heritage, the so

called ‘‘memory institution.’’ Lorcan Dempsey describes this institution as follows:

Archives, libraries and museums are memory institutions: they organize the Euro-

pean cultural and intellectual record. Their collections contain the memory of peo-

ples, communities, institutions and individuals, the scientific and cultural heritage,

and the products throughout time of our imagination, craft and learning. They join us

to our ancestors and are our legacy to future generations. They are used by the child,

the scholar, and the citizen, by the business person, the tourist and the learner. These

in turn are creating the heritage of the future. Memory institutions contribute directly

and indirectly to prosperity through support for learning, commerce, tourism, and

personal fulfillment. (Dempsey 2000)

Although the three institutions—in their bricks-and-mortar form—have quite different

traditions of documentation and organization, they share, at least in Germany, a common

goal, the preservation and presentation of cultural heritage (including natural history), and

moreover, they share it with the digital memory institution. Digital memory institutions do

not compete with archives, libraries and museums; on the contrary, the memory institution

increases the visibility of these institutions, as Dempsey emphasizes:

Memory institutions are actively connecting their collections to these emerging

knowledge networks. They are creating innovative network services based on digital

surrogates of their current collections in rich interactive digital environments. They

are focusing their traditional curatorial values on the challenges of the rapidly

changing and growing digital resource, and developing relevant practices to support

its use and management over time. (Dempsey 2000)

The technical equipment for establishing such a memory institution has been developed

only recently, but the dream of collecting all kinds of media in one repository of knowl-

edge can be traced back to the ancient origins of information and documentation praxis.

Archives, libraries and museums have a common ancestor: the Mouseion of Alexandria. In

the imagination of Renaissance and Baroque thinkers, knowledge and objects of all kinds

belonged together and formed one single intellectual space. Athanasius Kircher (1602–

1680) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) designed institutions of knowledge

(Leinkauf 1993; Findlen 2004) that appeal to all the senses and that will produce new

insights; new perspectives can emerge as objects and kinds of knowledge are combined

that superficially bear no relation to each other. The Museum Kircherianum (Fig. 1), e.g.,

shows the typical mixture of Kunstkammer objects: natural and cultural history objects, a

globe, scientific instruments, etc. Baroque scholarship not only saw a semiotic significance

and a coherence of all things, of macrocosms and microcosms, but also an evolution from

nature to culture. (Leinkauf 1993; Bredekamp 1993/1995; Porter 2005). In this context,

Horst Bredekamp speaks of the whirring processes of exchange and stimulation regarding

the cerebral theater of representation (Bredekamp 2004).

Paul Otlet (1868–1944), a Belgian librarian and founder of the Mundaneum (also called

the Palais Mondial), described in his 1934 Traite de documentation a scenario, where

metadata of memory institutions were held, ordered, categorized and classified in a central

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place, the Palais Mondial (Fig. 2), and then offered via cable to the public, with documents

delivered via television. Among the memory institutions, he included archives, libraries,

and museums. In addition to texts (in manuscript or in print) and objects (whether two- or

three-dimensional), he considered still and moving images, as well as audio and visual

recordings, the newest media technology of that time. In his fantastic projection, current

projects offering digitized information over Internet platforms came close to something

soon to be turned into reality. One of the tools for reliable information retrieval (IR) was

the classification of objects using the Universal Decimal Classification, for example. His

imagination was struck by the possibility that information could be made available

ubiquitously and that people could interact simultaneously without being in the same place.

(Otlet 1934).

Otlet shared the vision of Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968) and others of the betterment of

the world through the advancement of technology. He would likely have subscribed to

Fig. 1 de Sepibus 1678 (Heidelberg University Library)

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the report on cyber infrastructure of the American Society of Learned Societies published

in 2005.1 Severely abridged, their argument runs as follows: a good cyber infrastructure

will cause good citizenship and good government, leading to more tolerance, under-

standing and prosperity. In consequence, the growing richness of human experience,

human creativity, and the awareness of the diversity of human cultures will bring about the

betterment of all. It is amazing that such optimistic visions have survived until now. We

claim for us—with a look on the history of technology—a more skeptical view on the

chances and promises of technological development.

In 1947, more than a decade after the publication of the Traite de documentation, Andre

Malraux wrote about the impact of reproductions of paintings for the pictorial knowledge

of students and envisioned an imaginary museum (musee imaginaire) containing only

reproductions. Although his imaginary museum was limited to photographs, (Malraux

1965) argued that it would give a more complete insight into the pictorial world than the

limited collection of any museum in the world could ever provide.

Digitization islands vs. connected cultural content

In addition to archives, libraries, and museums, there are institutions such as music

archives, the archives of the broadcasting and television services, the digital records of the

public authorities for historical monuments, archeological sites, etc. All these institutions

Fig. 2 Indexing and cataloging in the Palais Mondial in 1903 (Mundaneum Brussels)

1 \http://www.acls.org/uploadedfiles/publications/programs/our_cultural_commonwealth.pdf[.

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have produced a large amount of digital data during the last few decades, most of the

digitization campaigns being financed by the national governments, regional authorities or

the European Union. Due to project regulations during the last years, most of the content

was and still is made available on the Internet. As a consequence, the quantity of cultural

information on the Internet is growing rapidly. What is lacking, however, is a connection

between the digital collections of the individual institutions that could serve as bridges

connecting the digitization islands in the vast sea of the Internet. The consequence for users

is that they have to island hop from one online database to the next using different user

interfaces and underlying indexing structures for each database. From the users’ per-

spective it would be more convenient to have one platform where they can stop and search

all the available online databases (a single point of access like online information providers

such as DIALOG offer for many different databases). This would also reduce the danger of

missing interesting sources. For this reason, demand is growing for a joint portal of all

German cultural heritage databases on the Internet.

The major advantage of such a joint portal is that it connects various cultural online

databases in one user interface. Objects can be searched and retrieved using uniform search

procedures, and presented in uniform result lists. The scope of such a portal is of high

relevance to scholarship, since most of the abovementioned institutions are state funded

and employ persons who have scholarly backgrounds in the sciences, the humanities and/or

in library or information science and archival or museological studies. Given the efforts of

documentation, portals such as BAM allow retrieval with high accuracy. By contrast,

Google-like searches suffer from channel noise, because of the redundancy and lack of

precision of what has been indexed from Web sites. Furthermore, in portals like BAM,

objects can be discovered that were previously kept in separate institutions—institutionally

and geographically. In this way, we are coming close to Otlet’s vision of global access to

the range of knowledge and the wisdom of mankind.

A joint portal offers the explicit, algorithmic knowledge that could be reproduced

according to known and common rules and thus often processed by machines without

regard to social contexts. The availability of images of all kinds supports a second kind of

implicit or metaphorical knowledge, such as memories, abstractions, or perceptions

(Poppel 2007). Images will be of growing importance to knowledge, with fears of new

forms of illiteracy and of conceptual impoverishment likely exaggerated. Images have

gained more and more weight at the expense of text, and a new kind of literacy might

develop over time, including ‘‘the ability to read, write and interact across a range of

platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio

and film, to digital social networks’’ (Thomas et al. 2007).

Such a joint portal could work with a central index and display its advantages: high

speed of retrieval, display of linguistic (e.g. stemming, i.e. removing inflection forms

automatically) and semantic features. Authority files, i.e. controlled vocabulary developed

and maintained by big institutions like national libraries or the Getty Trust, could be used

to enhance the search by offering tools for the easy navigation in complex semantic spaces

(faceted browsing, topic maps) and retrieval (e. g. recognition of proper names by checking

the index against controlled vocabularies, expansion of the semantic space of a searched

term by inclusion of synonyms). What often has been perceived as mutually exclusive:

automatic indexing and the intellectual endeavors of controlled vocabularies must com-

plement each other. The identification of one person in many languages with very different

spellings constitutes a problem that largely is open to automation, while still requiring an

amount of intellectual effort (Steinberger and Pouliquen 2007). Paul Otlet wanted to

structure and enhance retrieval strategies by using and developing classification tools.

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He was a collaborator of the initial editions of the Universal Decimal Classification

(Rayword 1990; Otlet 1934). Since that time the reliability of automatic indexing proce-

dures has improved, nevertheless it may be too early to forego classifications and other

critically controlled authority files. Currently, only a human knowledge of the world can

identify, that ‘‘Goethe’’ and ‘‘Gete’’ are the same person though spelled differently in

different languages or that ‘‘Chemnitz’’ and ‘‘Karl-Marx-Stadt’’ are the same place over

time as is indicated in the Name Authority File (Personennamendatei, PND) of the German

National Library and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. Some can remember the

promise of automatic translation in the sixties and of artificial intelligence in the seven-

ties—promises that have never been fulfilled. It seems therefore reasonable to remain

doubtful toward the promises of the adherents of automatic indexing. As semantic relations

of texts and images are of never ending and always changing variety, automatic procedures

are successful in environments of limited semantic variability, such as the sciences. Even

in the future, the use of a critical intellect in dealing with controlled vocabulary will be

indispensable, in order to help users of Internet resources to find as precise as possible the

information objects they want to retrieve.

BAM—A joint portal for libraries, archives, and museums

BAM, the joint portal of Libraries (in German: Bibliotheken), Archives, and Museums,

intends to set up a digital memory institution for Germany and to establish itself as a single

point of access for cultural content. As a means to this end, the Library Service Centre

Baden-Wurttemberg (Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-Wurttemberg, BSZ) serves as the

hosting institution, and:

• cooperates with other cultural heritage initiatives on a national and international level,

e.g. in Austria and Switzerland;

• develops appropriate organizational and administrative structures for the management

of its content, i.e. the metadata (the structured data about the information objects, e. g. a

catalog entry; Sieglerschmidt 2002) from the digital collections of the participating

institutions;

• coordinates and unifies the relevant metadata;

• supports the use of metadata standards and authority files; and

• furthers the development of technical functions of the portal.

A portal providing access and visibility

Currently there exists no national Internet portal for cultural content in Germany. The German

Digital Library (Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, DDB) is still under (legal and financial)

development; the BAM portal is the single point of access for all users who are searching

items of cultural content on the German Web. As a consequence, the potential range of users is

very broad, the major target audience being scholars, students, but also a general public of

interested laypersons. As it is considered a central educational and scientific resource, access

to the portal and the content of the participating institutions is free of charge.

The BAM portal offers participating institutions a common, cross-institutional access

point to digital catalogs, repertories, and inventories. With this purpose in mind, metadata

of the participating institutions are collected, stored, indexed and made searchable on the

BAM server, while the media content, i.e. the images (and in theory other digital

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materials), is stored in the online databases of the participating institutions which keep full

control over and responsibility for their digital materials, using BAM only as a gateway

and as a means to increase their visibility on the Web. For smaller institutions without

online databases, a host service is offered by BAM. These latter institutions can store both

the metadata and the media content of their digital collections in the BAM database, which

allows them to present their content on the Internet without having to maintain a complex

Web presence. As a bonus for sharing their content via BAM, these institutions can include

a search form on their Web sites in order to present their own content on their own

homepage. This option is important for institutions with limited resources and low visi-

bility on the Web.

In addition to serving as a central point of access, BAM tries to increase the visibility of

the digital content of all participating institutions. For this reason, in August 2007 an

alliance was formed between BAM and Wikipedia Germany, the German language version

of the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Wikipedia Germany created a specific template for

BAM that connects the encyclopaedia’s Web links section to a predefined query in BAM

(see Fig. 3). Both services can take advantage of this alliance: Wikipedia Germany offers

its users a wide range of sources to investigate, while BAM increases the visibility of its

partners’ digital content and draws traffic to their sites. As of December 2008, more than

900 links had been created in Wikipedia Germany and the process goes on, continually

increasing the number of BAM links.

A detailed analysis of log files has not yet been carried out, and thus the abovemen-

tioned target audience of the BAM portal remains unclear; it is not the result of a thorough

examination. The analysis of the log files carried out so far shows that there are more than

1,000 visits per day or around 30,000 visits per month from June 2008 to May 2009. While

minimal compared with the big search engines, it is much more when compared with

similar services in Germany like vascoda or the Central Index of Digitized Imprints

(ZVDD). The link to Wikipedia has increased the traffic considerably.

Fig. 3 The Wikipedia Germany template for BAM

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Organizational issues and figures

Originally, the BAM Portal started as a project funded by the German Research Foundation

(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) in 2001. Since 2007 it has been run by a con-

sortium consisting of the following institutions:

• The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz), Berlin;

• State Archive of Baden-Wurttemberg (Landesarchiv Baden-Wurttemberg), Stuttgart;

• State Museum of Technology and Labour (Landesmuseum fur Technik und Arbeit)

Mannheim;

• Library Service Centre Baden-Wurttemberg (Bibliotheksservice-Zentrum Baden-

Wurttemberg), Konstanz.

Table 1 shows the total number of data sets in BAM as of May 2008.

Technical issues

In BAM, a simple Google search field or an extended search form allows for searches

through digital collections of heterogeneous provenance and structure. Results are linked

back to originating catalogs where detailed information may be accessed (see Fig. 4).

Digital reproductions of the objects, if existing, are also available.

The biggest challenge at the project’s beginning was the integration of the different

metadata formats into one reference format for indexing and presentation. When work

began in 2001, in Germany only the libraries possessed a common metadata framework for

the exchange of data: MAB (machine readable exchange format for libraries). The archives

Table 1 The total number of data sets in BAM

BAM total 41,195,322

Libraries 37,175,528

Northern German Union Catalogue GBV (some 330 scholarly libraries) *20 M

Southwestern German Union Catalogue SWB (some 1,200 scholarly libraries) *13 M

State Library of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin *3 M

Central Index of Digitized Imprints (ZVDD) *0.5 M

Archives 2,905,652

State Archives of Baden-Wurttemberg 1.7 M

State Archives of Hesse 0.8 M

Federal Archive of Germany 88 K

Municipal Archives (Freiburg, Heilbronn, Reutlingen, Mainz) 86 K

Museums 291,563

Architecture Museum of the TU Berlin (collection of technical plans and drawings) 69 K

Historical Museum of the City of Leipzig 141 K

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin 11 K

digiCULT Schleswig–Holstein 18 K

Foundation Haus der Geschichte, Bonn/Leipzig 6.5 K

German Historical Museum, Berlin 6.5 K

Other sources (Kalliope portal) 822,708

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used Encoded Archival Description (EAD),2 a metadata standard, which is accepted today

among archivists in Germany. The museums practiced some kind of organized anarchy and

had no common metadata framework at all. Since then, the museumdat standard has been

developed in Germany and seems to be accepted as harvesting format in the German

museum community.3

The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES) was adopted as internal scheme at

the beginning of the BAM project.4 By now a proprietary scheme has been developed in

the pursuit of a sophisticated indexing and advanced search procedure. Europeana, the

cultural portal of the European Union, is facing analogous problems, yet is hoped that these

different communities will be able to meet on the common ground of the CIDOC Con-ceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM), an ontology that is already harmonized with the

Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR).5 CIDOC is the subcommittee

of the International Council of museums dealing with matters of documentation (Comiteinternational pour la documentation). The CIDOC CRM was developed to avoid the

shortcomings of metadata schemas, which are rigid in structure and not able to represent

the complexity of relationships between things of the world. It is the purpose of ontologies

(a concept of the information sciences) like the CRM or the FRBR to structure the world of

certain domains of knowledge (e. g. cultural heritage) in a form that could be read and

processed by machines. FRBR are developed by a working group of the InternationalFederation of Library Associations and Institutions and is able to reorganize online library

catalogs to the users advantage, who get precise results and offers for an easy navigation.

All metadata formats mentioned above can be mapped to CIDOC CRM, i.e. are compatible

Fig. 4 Information levels of the BAM portal

2 \http://www.loc.gov/ead/[.3 \http://museum.zib.de/museumdat/[.4 \http://dublincore.org/[.5 \http://cidoc.ics.forth.gr/index.html[;\http://www.ifla.org/publications/functional-requirements-for-bibliographic-records[.

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with this reference format. It is thus possible that a common reference format might

prepare the ground for the automatic uploading and updating of data to portals like BAM or

Europeana, although this is a long way off.

In the three participating memory institutions, the cataloging of objects is done at

different levels of granularity, which leads to very different numbers of records being

available. While libraries can copy entire bibliographic records from other libraries,

museums and archives have to invest a lot of effort in the cataloging of their unique

resources. Hence, the list of results is somewhat unbalanced and will continue to be so,

especially because libraries are nearly twenty years ahead in terms of the digital cataloging

of their objects. In the future, result listing procedures will have to provide for a better

ranking of museums and archives, so that these get a chance to be visible on the top of a list.

The technical approach as demonstrated here is quite simple (Fig. 4): The BAM portal

collects only the metadata of the objects located in the online databases of the participating

institutions. The lists produced are fed back in the expert information system, where the

objects are shown in the appropriate presentation format. This procedure has two main

advantages: the separate presentation models of very different kinds of materials (manu-

scripts, three-dimensional objects, books, etc.) are the responsibility of the expert systems;

and the BAM portal is not occupied with several, perhaps puzzling kinds of presented

objects. The archives especially want to present their material according to the provenance,

i.e. the origin of the single record in the (administrative and personal) context of a defined

historical process. Archivists are not so concerned about pertinence, i.e. ordering the

material by subject, as a finding aid. Rather they think that using pertinence or subject

headings for indexing can obscure the context of a record and thus be misleading.

The technology of BAM is based on the Apache-Lucene full text search engine library

and other open-source components. Figure 5 shows the work flow for those who want to

know more about the technical design of the BAM portal. A SQL (Standard QueryLanguage) database contains the data about the providers, the previously installed settings

for indexing and the configuration of the assembly or pipeline, i.e. the working process that

transforms and indexes the incoming data. The data is delivered either by the administrator

directly and processed by him/her manually or the data is uploaded and processed auto-

matically. Whereas initially data were integrated by hand for every data format delivered

and transformed into a DCMES compatible data file by the administrator, the procedures of

data ingest will become more automated. Some platforms, e. g. ZVDD (see Table 1),

provide interfaces for harvesting data via an Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Meta-data Harvesting (OAI-PMH), but the prerequisites for this are as yet not present on the part

of most of the content providers. At this moment the data is stored as XML (ExtensibleMarkup Language, i.e. a syntax for structuring data) file in a file system (input and BAM

repository). During the next months, a Java Content repository (JCR) will be build up that

contains all XML data in a more structured form (input repository and BAM repository).

The pipeline indexer transforms the incoming data into the internal proprietary XML

formats for archives, museums and libraries with the Extensible Stylesheet LanguageTransformation (XSLT). This is a flexible instrument in order to integrate very different

formats into one reference format. This data is stored in the BAM repository and indexed

by Lucene producing the master index. The master index is mirrored by one or more slave

servers. This ensures that the performance is scalable if needed.

Lucene will be able to work efficiently by using preconverted data formats like mu-seumdat, the archival metadata format EAD, the German library exchange format MAB2

(in the future MARC21) and individual museum or archival formats and mappings. The

heterogeneous metadata from different content providers are mapped to a common

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proprietary format, which constitutes the raw input to a central search index. A query will

produce a list of brief result items that contain hyperlinks to more detailed information

provided either by the BAM portal or by the various online databases of the original

content providers.

By using authority files (see below) and stemming tools for the retrieval process, search

terms will be expanded by either synonyms or additional words that can relate to the term

sought-after. The predominant authority file used in BAM is the Subject Headings

Authority File of the German National Library (Schlagwortnormdatei, SWD). The SWD

provides a controlled vocabulary for all areas of knowledge that is continuously expanded

with special regard to the needs of museums. The list of reference works for authority files

(Liste der fachlichen Nachschlagewerke zu den Normdateien6) is used as a source. The

SWD is compiled by the German National Library and six regional German library

organizations, among them the BSZ.

The SWD may be used in the search option of the BAM portal to help users to find their

way through the data by offering semantic tools for widening or narrowing the search.

Although very useful, authority files are not yet common in the daily work of German

archives and museums. For this reason, a lot of the information in the BAM portal has no

relation to the SWD or other authority files. Therefore, automatically indexed terms of

these data are related for the most important results (for roots, composite terms) of this

process to the SWD.

The consequences of ubiquitous knowledge

The effects of the ubiquitous availability of scholarly information on scientific commu-

nities and scholarship are considerable. Ten years ago, if one compiled a list of literature

Fig. 5 The technical structure of the BAM portal

6 \http://support.ddb.de/swd/listeNSW/index.htm[.

Arch Sci (2008) 8:251–266 261

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relevant to a certain topic, one could find the majority in the union catalogs in the local

library without consulting a card catalog. Now-a-days, you can search online for the

famous phrase of the invisible hand as a metaphor for the market economy in Adam

Smith’s book about the Wealth of Nations (1776). You will not only find the images of the

pages of the first edition of 1776, but also the indexed text of the whole book so that you

can easily find the exact page in any particular edition (see Fig. 6).

This is but one example of the growing Internet access to (medieval) manuscripts and

(early) printed books and journals. It remains to be seen what the contributions of GoogleBooks, one of the players in the field, will be. For example, the phrase HeidelbergerSchloss (Heidelberg castle) entered into the Google search field will provide a lot of tourist

information. The same phrase entered into the BAM search engine gives fewer but more

precise results from a scholarly perspective. Apart from the literature on the topic, the

system provides information about archival records (e.g. of the State Archives of Baden-

Wurttemberg and Hesse) and museum objects, among them construction plans from the

Architecture Museum in Berlin concerning the restoration of the castle around 1900.

Information from such heterogeneous sources—by location, time, person, and subject—are

the added value provided by portals such as BAM or Europeana.

These are but two examples of this fast growing universe of digital information

available on the Internet. The interlinking of information will be enhanced once images can

be retrieved by pattern recognition or spoken words by decoding speech. Such technologies

are a part of research projects, not yet productive in everyday systems (cf. in Germany the

Theseus program7 or in France the Quaero project8).

Fig. 6 Digitized book of Adam Smith (The Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature)

7 \http://theseus-programm.de/[.8 \http://www.quaero.org/[.

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European efforts of digitizing cultural heritage: the german digital library and theEuropeana

Like other projects in the field of libraries, archives and museums, the BAM portal fits well

into the plans of the European Union. The BSZ and the BAM consortium have a strong

interest in cooperating with other institutions all over Europe, in order to develop a joint

European portal for cultural content. A number of projects in a number of institutions and

countries represent a first step in this direction. There are many projects of the national

libraries, of the national museums and archives, such as the British Library,9 the National

Archive of Germany,10 Gallica of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France11 and Joconde of

the Ministere de la culture de France.12 Photo archives like the German Bildindex13 by

Foto Marburg and other institutions holding cultural heritage objects present a lot of

information online. Universities and educational institutions offer much of their infor-

mation online, e. g., Basel Mission Picture Archive,14 ECHO15 or the portal of university

collections Universeum,16 to mention but a few examples. All these distributed databases

should be integrated into a European portal presenting the diversity and the common

traditions of European cultural heritage in all branches of knowledge.

Digitized knowledge is present in many projects and platforms, not all of which can be

mentioned here (some of them appear in Fig. 7), yet in Europe there are only two examples

of BAM-like regional or national platforms: ArBiMus in Denmark,17 ABM Utvikling in

Norway.18 There is already a considerable amount of scholarly content on the Internet that

ought to be included in a common platform. One example, beside ECHO and many similar

lists in the sciences, is the H-list of the humanities and social sciences \http://www.

h-net.org/reviews/[. Although many reviews have been published (some 4,600 reviews

from 2004 to 2007), union catalogs—at least the German ones—do not connect their

metadata to those reviews.

The aim of all digitization efforts in the European Union is the accessibility of the

natural and cultural heritage via the Internet. From a political perspective, access should be

open and free of charge. Nevertheless, one can imagine scenarios that include commercial

information providers such as publishers, radio and television stations and other media

enterprises, the billing procedures being available and easily implemented.

Europeana19 was launched in November 2008. It is the outcome of a ten years effort by

the European Commission to promote a single point of access for digitized natural and

cultural objects on the Internet. The activity of the European Commission was paralleled

by endeavors of the member states to make cultural heritage available digitally and online.

9 \http://www.bl.uk/collections/toppage.html[.10 \http://www.bundesarchiv.de/bestaende_findmittel/bestaendeuebersicht/index_frameset.html[.11 \http://gallica.bnf.fr/[.12 \http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/joconde/fr/apropos/presentation-joconde.htm[.13 \http://www.bildindex.de/[.14 \http://www.bmpix.org/[.15 \http://echo2.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/home[.16 \http://www.universeum.de/[.17 \http://www.arbimus.dk/[.18 \http://www.abm-utvikling.no/[.19 \http://www.europeana.eu[.

Arch Sci (2008) 8:251–266 263

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The technical approach of the European portal is similar to the one of BAM. Whereas the

BAM portal shows the metadata of all objects, even if the object is not linked to accessible

digitized data, e.g. full text book or images, Europeana is restricted to digitally available

materials. This leads to a considerable difference in total numbers, as seen in an example

from the BAM portal: in BAM, the overall number of indexed objects is some 40 million,

while the total number of indexed objects connected to digital materials is only 1.4 million

objects.

In order to provide collections of digital materials for Europeana, a European Union

project was launched: ATHENA.20 ATHENA will bring together relevant stakeholders and

content owners from museums and other cultural institutions all over Europe and evaluate

and integrate specific tools, based on a common agreed set of standards and guidelines to

create harmonised access to their content.

A German Digital Library is still being developed. As the national portal it is to serve as

the German partner of Europeana and the point of aggregation of digitized data from

Germany in the framework of the European digitization strategy. A recent feasibility study

shows that the administration of some 100 million objects poses no problems for existing

technology. With 2010 as the target date, rules and regulations are being designed to enable

the German federal government and the states to establish, fund and maintain the network

of a German Digital Library. This funding is a prerequisite for establishing the central

services and the technical systems. The federal states of Germany have already invested in

and will continue to invest in the digital future of the cultural heritage and of cultural

knowledge.

Fig. 7 German and international digitisation undertakings and projects

20 \http://www.athenaeurope.org/[.

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Conclusions

The visions of Paul Otlet and Andre Malraux might soon turn into reality, but as of this

moment we cannot know whether we will get lost in the deluge of information. Paul Otlet

was convinced that the enhanced access to information of all kinds would lead to the

development and betterment of mankind (Otlet 1934). The chances are there, indeed. The

examples given suggest that success in the acquisition of knowledge and the expansion of

scholarship is possible by linking knowledge resources previously separate, through an

enhanced knowledge organization. These hopes seem to be reasonable, although one might

be skeptical whether these projects will lead to advances in knowledge. Whether people

will profit from the advances of knowledge must also remain an unanswered question

because the enlargement of technical possibilities too often has enlarged human foolish-

ness. That most technical devices are initially developed for the military for destructive

purposes is but one example. Nevertheless BAM, Europeana and similar endeavors could

be a reliable source of authentic material examined and offered by hundreds of thousands

of European institutions from all cultural and scientific heritage sectors. In this they offer

an improvement over Google, because they offer a more precise and reliable sources

of information.

Acknowledgments The authors want to thank Peter Marzahl and Thomas Max Safley for the enhancementof their Continental English and for insisting on more clarity of expression and concepts. All shortcomingsare the responsibility of the authors.

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Author Biographies

Thomas Kirchhoff is the software engineer of BAM, the joint portal to libraries, archives and museums,working on the project since July 2005. He is coordinating both the contributions of the various institutionsand the technical development of BAM. He studied theoretical physics at the University of Konstanz andSimon Fraser University, Vancouver.

Dr. Werner Schweibenz is Deputy Head of MusIS-Team. MusIS is coordinating the documentation of theState Museums of the German federal state of Baden-Wurttemberg. He studied information science at theUniversity of Saarland and the University of Missouri-Columbia. His Ph.D. thesis (published in December2008) describes the transition of the traditional museum to the virtual museum on the Internet.

Dr. Jorn Sieglerschmidt is the head of MusIS-Team and responsible for the coordination of the BAMportal. He is a member of the federal committee for the coordination of the German Digital Library and of asubcommittee of the Europeana, the cultural portal of the European Union. Before starting the MusISproject, he worked as a curator at the State Museum of Technology and Labour, Mannheim. He taught(early) modern European history and museology at the Universities of Konstanz, Karlsruhe and Mannheimand published beside several articles on documentation in the last year’s articles on historical geography,economic, social, environmental history and the semiotics of history.

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