Public domain
As society produces ever greater volumes of digital data, the long-term preservation of digital-born information and digitised objects is becoming increasingly important. Digital cultural heritage is an essential part of this data ensemble connecting society with its past.
The European Commission funds the common European data space for cultural heritage (based in Europeana) and the eArchiving Initiative. The European data space for cultural heritage supports aggregating and sharing memory institution’s content, while the eArchiving Initiative supports maintaining and preserving digital-born information and digitised objects.
The application of these initiatives to the cultural heritage arena is yielding important results, as seen in two recent projects:
- J-ARK – a long-term digital repository solution, powered and developed by the Jewish Heritage Network funded by the European Commission's CEF program.
- eKULTURA – a Croatian aggregator for audio-visual, archival, library and museum digitalised material funded by the European Regional Development Fund.
The Jewish Heritage Network worked with eArchiving and Europeana to create an end-to-end solution to support the needs of small and medium-sized Jewish heritage collections. The J-Ark solution complies with Europeana, archival standards and the E-ARK specifications. It is the first to connect Europeana’s aggregation infrastructure with eArchiving-compliant systems and processes for the long-term preservation of Jewish heritage materials.
The Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia launched the eKULTURA aggregator for audio-visual, archival, library and museum material. The project aims to protect and increase the online availability of digital cultural content, ensuring the safe storage of digital cultural content in one place and providing users with unique access to the stored content. It offers technical support to Croatian institutions that wish to share their material in the Europeana Collection. The project uses the Repository of Authentic Digital Records (RODA), an open-source software compliant with widely accepted E-ARK specifications for the automated harvest and transfer of information packages from the cultural institutions to the central repository, thus ensuring the long-term preservation of the digitised objects and their metadata.
The eKULTURA aggregator and the J-ARK project share the same objective: Preserving and disseminating a common cultural heritage as reliable, authentic and useful information. The use of Europeana as a knowledge aggregator, supported by compliant software with the E-ARK specifications for long-term preservation, is a foundation for disseminating the European cultural legacy. Preserving the digital and digitised cultural legacy and its related data and metadata is the basis for sharing reliable and authentic data, fighting against disinformation and mitigating intolerance and prejudice.
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Image attribution: Katedrala - State Archives in Zagreb, Croatia