Completed work – Digisam

Guiding principles

To enable effective cooperation between a large number of players regarding digitisation and its related processes, a collection of core principles is required. Digisam has produced a document with principles that are intended to be used to support the alignment of decisions and help to coordinate digital information in an efficient manner. Because the principles should be long term, they do not contain references to specific techniques. The ways in which to live up to the principles will vary over time. Our hope is that the principles lead to a discussion about the need for more detailed assistance in the form of guidelines and instructions. The principles are divided based on the following four areas: Govern, Produce, Use, Preserve.

An English translation of the guiding principles can be found here.

Digital preservation: A pilot study

One of the main tasks of Digisam is connected to a proposal on how coordinated and cost-effective preservation of digital cultural heritage information at Swedish state cultural heritage institutions that collect, preserve, and provide access to cultural heritage material, should be designed. As a first part of our work on this issue, Digisam has carried out a pilot study on long-term digital preservation. In the pilot study, the current state of storage and preservation at cultural heritage authorities, was examined and compared with the current ”state of the art”.

A short version of the report is available in English: Digital Preservation at Cultural Heritage Institutions in Sweden.

An article about the report is published at Digital Meets Culture. Read the article here.

The full-length report in Swedish is published here.

The Conference #nordlod in Malmö, Sweden

Digisam organised the conference ”Open heritage data in the Nordic countries ”, together with Media Evolution 24-25 April 2013. Focus was on Nordic initiatives in the linked open data area. Speakers came from Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and Australia. Read more on the conference website ”Open Cultural Heritage Data in the Nordic Countries 24 – 25 April 2013”.

DISKA

During 2013 Digisam together with KTH / CSC got funding from Vinnova to work on the project Digital Semantic Cultural Heritage Authorities – DISKA. The project’s goal was to make an inventory / lists of references of resources at the cultural heritage authorities, revise the strategic selection of such resources to turn into RDF and publish them as linkable open data.

More information about the project can be found at Vinnova http://www.vinnova.se/sv/Resultat/Projekt/Effekta/DISKA—Digitala-semantiska-kulturarvsauktoriteter (in Swedish).

An article about the DISKA-project can be found on the Resource-page.

The DISKA-project is published on epractice.eu http://www.epractice.eu/en/cases/diska.

Linked Heritage

Linked Heritage (Coordination of Standards and Technologies for the enrichment of Europeana) was known as a Best Practice Network within the EU Framework Programme ”Competitiveness and Innovation”. Linked Heritage had three missions: To contribute large quantities of new content to Europeana, from both the public and private sectors; to demonstrate enhancement of quality of content, in terms of metadata richness, re-use potential and uniqueness; and to demonstrate and enable improved search, retrieval and use of Europeana content. The Project was coordinated by the Ministry of Culture in Italy. Digisam participated in tasks concerning aggregation, vocabularies and semantics, and was for example active in translating course material into Swedish.

Read more about the project at its homepage or take a closer look at the project’s online course about terminologies, SKOS and more.

Spectrum

Spectrum is a freely available standard for collection management that is used in more than 40 countries. Digisam and the National Heritage Board teamed up to translate and adapt the Spectrum manual to Swedish conditions.

Regulatory and institutional plans

Authorities and institutions directly involved in the Swedish National digitisation strategy should have plans made for their digitisation activities. Digisam coordinated the work on the plans, organized networking events and, supported by a team of experts, developed support documents for the process.