Our work

During Digisams activity period 2011-2015, a number of tasks are to be implemented to achieve the objectives of the Swedish National digitisation strategy. We regard the infrastructure as something that will run through every area of Digisam’s mission.

• 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. See the movies from the conference here.

• 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  (in Swedish). The DISKA-project is published on epractice.eu http://www.epractice.eu/en/cases/diska.

• 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.

• EU network and EU-projects
  A number of Swedish cultural heritage institutions are involved in EU projects bearing revelance to digital cultural heritage. Digisam has started a networking group to share the experience and knowledge held by these institutions. The group discusses strategic issues, both from a national and a European perspective.
  • DCH RP – Digital Cultural Heritage Roadmap for Preservation
    The EU project DCH-RP has developed a roadmap that describes how one should proceed in order to preserve the digital heritage through an integrated digital infrastructure. Several Swedish cultural heritage institutions have been involved in the tests and Digisam coordinates their participation.
  • Athena Plus
    Digisam participates in the EU project Athena Plus which, among other things, is about to contribute metadata to the digital library Europeana in order to improve search, data retrieval and reuse of Europeana’s data content.
  • 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.
  • Europeana Inside
    Europeana Inside is a European project with the aim to, among other things, bring new digital cultural content from European cultural heritage institutions into the digital library Europeana, and simplify the delivery process. Digisam follows the work of the project and will disseminate the results of the participating cultural heritage institutions.

   

• Legal Issues
  Digisam is working towards developing the basic conditions for the use of photographs and other items of fine art and applied art that are in the collections and archives of the heritage institutions. This work is done in conjunction with representatives from cultural institutions and copyright organisations. In parallel, work is underway to develop national guidelines on copyright law, other laws that are closely connected, and useful contract templates in general.
• Infrastructure
  In order to increase access to, use of, and preservation of digital cultural heritage information, a sustainable infrastructure is needed. To Digisam the word infrastructure means, to put it simply, a platform that has layers of information, services and tools that support the key processes for managing integrated digital heritage. Digisam is currently producing background material showing how the infrastructure looks like today and how it might look in a desired future state.
• Collaboration with the Royal Institute of Technology
  Heritage Information is cross-community information that is well suited to needs- and interest-driven learning. Digisam participates in an ongoing collaboration, with among others the Royal Institute of Technology, aimed at developing technology and methods for using the growing amount of digital cultural heritage information in education on all levels.
• Audiovisual
  Digisam and the National Library are leading a working group on audiovisual material. The group’s work is aimed at reducing the risk of valuable cultural heritage information in the form of audio and video being lost, contributing to the efficient use of resources within the cultural heritage domain, and to increase access to audiovisual collections.