The role of metadata in the longevity of cultural heritage resources

Milena Dobreva, Nikola Ikonomov

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Digital preservation is an integral part of the management of information and the institutions in the cultural heritage sector are seeking for ways to incorporate it into their everyday practice. While there are generic approaches to long-term preservation, further research and development work is needed to address any specifics of the digital objects in the cultural heritage domain. In this paper, we will take two case studies of recent projects and analyse to what extent the metadata accompanying digital objects contribute to guarantee longevity. We summarize this analysis in two scenarios for sustainability of resources produced by small projects because compared to big institutions their digital assets are facing a higher risk not to be preserved properly. We also identify processes where natural language technologies could be of help to make the preservation more efficient.

Original languageEnglish
Pages69-76
Number of pages8
Publication statusPublished - 30 Mar 2009
EventEACL 2009 Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education, LaTeCH-SHELT and R 2009 - Athens, Greece
Duration: 30 Mar 200930 Mar 2009

Conference

ConferenceEACL 2009 Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education, LaTeCH-SHELT and R 2009
Country/TerritoryGreece
CityAthens
Period30/03/0930/03/09

Funding

The KT-DigiCult-BG project funded by the Marie Curie programme of FP6 was recently finished (in 2008) and one of its outcomes was the creation of the Digitisation Centre in the Institute of Mathematics and Mathematics at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (IMI-BAS). This centre digitised a substantial number of various types of objects belonging to the Bulgarian cultural and scientific heritage (see Table 2). One of the issues the project faced was the organisation and the long-term preservation of these objects. These resources were not deeply annotated and are intended for the most general type of users – the citizens. In this case the metadata used in the mix of archival materials, old printed books, photographs and periodicals followed various encodings and were not encoded like the metadata of the TEXTE project using the same Guidelines.

Keywords

  • digital storage
  • historical preservation

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