Digital Cultural Heritage Works and
Object Description within the Scope
of Europeana
Tolga Çakmak – Şahika Eroğlu
Hacettepe University – Department of Information Management
{tcakmak, sahikaeroglu}@hacettepe.edu.tr
Archives and Cultural Industries Congress – 11th-15th October 2014, Girona, Spain.
Outline
Digital Cultural Heritage
Description of Cultural Heritage Objects
Europeana
Europeana Data Model
Digital Cultural Heritage
Cultural Heritage – Definition
All kinds of works, as the set of values which belong to a
community, which have a physical presence and created by human
beings
Scope
not only consist of tangible cultural assets but also includes
intangible cultural heritage materials
Digital Cultural Heritage
Museums, archives and libraries - responsibilities
Collecting, protecting and transferring of CHOs to the future
generations
Efforts to store and retrieve materials in digital media
Providing representation of CHOs in international platforms in order
to increase visibility and accessibility
Digital Cultural Heritage
Museums, archives and libraries – processes
Developing their collections according to communities’ cultural
assets,
Organizing them for information needs,
Increasing their visibility via cultural memory platforms by regional
or international solutions that serve dissemination of cultural
heritage among the societies
Digital Cultural Heritage
Museums, archives and libraries – processes
Digitalization of collections
Describing metadata fields of every single objects in their
collections
Description of Cultural Heritage Objects
Issues;
Different and independent usage of metadata fields expressed as
one of the biggest problems of cultural industries,
Interoperability issues,
Metadata mapping and crosswalk problems about integration to
regional or international platforms.
Description of Cultural Heritage Objects
Metadata enables the discovery of resources that reflect the
cultural heritage of a community
Different metadata schemes - used by different cultural memory
institutions
designed for a specific purpose to describe the resource
have a vital role for many digitization projects and digital library
initiatives especially in planning stages
Description of Cultural Heritage Objects
Different metadata schemes
type of institution,
staff expertise,
the purpose and structure of the metadata standard,
the materials to be digitized,
interoperability,
the objectives of the DL project
Metadata policies
Europeana – European Digital Library
One of the regional/international platforms
Important project in terms of circulation of cultural heritage assets
Covers different collections of museums, libraries and archives in
various countries
Best practices for dissemination of cultural heritage assets of
societies
Combining descriptions in a single framework
Convergence of description works
Europeana – EDM
Description of CHO carried out by Europeana Metadata and ContentPolicies
Ingestion procedures
Publication of Europeana Data Model – 2013
EDM with its ontology allows creation of specialized data models bydifferent institutions and creative industries
EDM provides a RDF structure ingested in Europeana and makes objectdescriptions available in semantic web formats with linked open dataelements
Stated as a strategy by the Europeana with the aim of developingEuropean digital library as a data transmission platform as well as aninternet portal that presents cultural objects
Europeana – EDM
aims to standardize representation of heterogeneous records
basis of a framework to harvest, integrate, and expose heterogeneous
metadata from thousands of cultural institutions throughout Europe
requirements;
flexible and extendable to support different specializations - a simple
unified view on the metadata is needed
it must be possible to relate and integrate the metadata
it must be possible to distinguish the different descriptions afterwards. This
is important to provide accurate information where a specific resource is
described
improving metadata quality via technical requirements
Results and Recommendations
Presentation of CHO is important for societies
Cultural memory institutions are the key institutions for description of CHO
Regional/international platforms have role for description of CHO carried
out by cultural memory institutions
Standards and schemes are main guides for interoperable platforms
Europeana as an international platform provides oppotunities in terms of
visibility and accessibility of CHO
Metadata policies are essential for cultural memory institutions
Coverage of these policies should contain interoperability and ingestion
issues;
Quality assessments should be placed in metadata policies
Digital Cultural Heritage Works and
Object Description within the Scope
of Europeana
Tolga Çakmak – Şahika Eroğlu
Hacettepe University – Department of Information Management
{tcakmak, sahikaeroglu}@hacettepe.edu.tr
Archives and Cultural Industries Congress – 11th-15th October 2014, Girona, Spain.