Creating the missing link. How to connect the workflow of 7000 cultural institutes into a dynamic network for reuse
Marco Streefkerk and Roxanne Wyns
For heritage to remain of value in the digital, networked society, combined reuse of distributed collections is crucial. However delivering content and metadata of cultural artifacts from their internal knowledge repositories, into public and open content aggregators such as Europeana, is still a major challenge for cultural organizations throughout Europe and worldwide.
Automation of their workflow as well as providing them with supporting knowledge and tools can remove or diminish existing barriers (organisation, legal, technical) for content providers, like museums. Especially for smaller organisations, the commercial vendors of their collection management systems are essential in making this possible. Europeana Inside, co-funded by the European Union under the CIP-ICT-PSP program to support the Digital Agenda for Europe, is unique as collaborative project of public memory organisations and commercial companies. When successful the project can set a best practice for potential 7000 memory institutions to achieve a lasting transformation in the quantity, scope and usability of the content available for distributed re-use. As the result these organisations will prove a strong foundation for the value network of digital cultural heritage.
During the first months of the project, dedicated to defining specifications, some major challenges were identified. Finding answers to these challenges, acceptable to all stakeholder (heritage institutions, service providers, creative industry, national and European government) is crucial to the success, not only of the project but also to the Europeana Network and indeed the international ecosystem for digital heritage. For the Europeana Inside consortium Digital Heritage 2013 provides an unique opportunity to validate the direction of the project against an audience of researchers and practitioners on digital heritage and make some final adjustments if necessary and define the outcomes in detail to be most valuable to the digital heritage domain.
