BAM – the joint portal for libraries, archives, museums in Germany intends to become a single point of access for cultural content and serves users who do not want to search several different databases at different servers using different search interfaces and vocabularies for access. In addition to combining different information services from different institutions in one point of access, BAM can also serve as a portal for a single institution’s libraries, archives, museums and media centres. BAM also tries to increase the visibility of the digital objects in the collections of the participants by cooperating with Wikipedia Germany and enriching articles with a link to content in BAM.
Table of content:
1. Introduction
2. BAM – A Joint Portal for Libraries, Archives, Museums
3. BAM Local – Uniting Different Branches of an Institution in one Portal
4. Increasing Content Visibility by Collaborating with Wikipedia
5. BAM and its Users
6. Conclusions
BAM, the joint portal for Libraries, Archives and Museums in Germany, considers itself to be a digital memory institution. Currently the portal holds more than 40 million records from a wide range of cultural institutions, some 37 million data sets from six libraries or union catalogs, 2.9 million data sets from eleven archives, 300.000 data sets from twenty museums and 800.000 data sets from other institutions.
These significant differences in numbers of data sets are not only due to the size of the holdings of the participating institutions but also to “cultural differences” between libraries, archives, and museums in creating records and collaborating in union catalogs.
The paper describes those differences from the perspective of the BSZ, the hosting organization of BAM, and a major contributor to BAM, the Foundation Prussian Cultural Heritage (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz), Berlin. The point of view is specific for the situation in Germany and might differ from the situation in other countries. There are certainly other important issues that are not mentioned here as we chose to take a perspective specific for BAM.
The spell of ubiquitous knowledge. Europeana, a portal to European cultural and scientific knowledge
(2009)
The target of Europeana is to make Europe's cultural and scientific resources accessible for all.
In detail the aims are:
- Providing access to Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage through a cross-domain portal,
- co-operating in the delivery and sustainability of the joint portal,
- stimulating initiatives to bring together existing digital content,
- supporting digitisation of Europe’s cultural and scientific heritage.
The paper describes the services of MusIS, the South-Western German Museum Network, for the curation of digital heritage. These services range from an object documentation software and the application of controlled vocabulary to a content management system for presentations on the Web and a joint portal for libraries, archives, and museums (the BAM Portal). The BAM Portal offers the possibility to connect selected content to the German Wikipedia and to improve the access to this content via this online encyclopaedia.