Digital cultural heritage works and object description within the scope of Europeana

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


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


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


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


Museums, archives and libraries – processes

Digitalization of collections

Describing metadata fields of every single objects in their

collections


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.


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


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.

Education

Digital cultural heritage works and object description within the scope of Europeana