Same same, but different? Challenges and solutions in the opening process of the GND authority control for cultural institutions.
The growing online presence of cultural heritage institutions such as museums, archives, libraries and other research institutions requires efficient ways to interlink the collections of our cultural treasures in web portals like Europeana or the German Digital Library (DDB). One precondition for interlinking datasets is the shared use of authority files and controlled vocabularies. The Integrated Authority File (GND) is a widely recognized vocabulary for description and information retrieval in German speaking library communities. It is a tool to guarantee true disambiguation of persons, corporations, geographica, subject headings, works etc. being referred to in all media types. Published as linked open data, the GND fosters semantic interoperability and re-use of data. Objects kept in different collections can be retrieved, and cross-disciplinary research is facilitated. However, authority control for the Semantic Web goes beyond the needs of librarians. In order to open the GND for interdisciplinary use, it needs to be adapted and actively transformed by the communities.
The opening process of the GND is accompanied by the project "GND for cultural data" (GND4C) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Together with the German National Library and the DDB, four project partners of the museum, archive and cultural heritage domain define their specific needs on the organisational structure, the data model and application profiles, the technical infrastructure and the community network beyond the library community. We like to focus on the challenge how to create an environment for true cross-domain authority control beyond shared vocabularies.
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.
Since several years it has been observed that information offered by different know-ledge producing institutions on the internet is more and more interlinked. This tendency will increase, because the fragmented information offers on the internet make the retrieval of information difficult or even impossible. At the same time the quantity of information offered on the internet grows exponentially in Europe – and elsewhere - due to many digitization projects. Inasfar as funding institutions base the acceptance of projects on the observation of certain documentation standards the knowledge created will be retrievable and will remain so for a long time. Otherwise the retrieval of information will become a matter of chance due to the limits of fragmented, knowledge producing social groups.
Since several years it has been observed that information offered by different knowledge producing institutions on the internet is more and more interlinked. This tendency will increase, because the fragmented information offers on the internet make the retrieval of information difficult or even impossible. At the same time the quantity of information offered on the internet grows exponentially in Europe – and elsewhere - due to many digitization projects. Inasfar as funding institutions base the acceptance of projects on the observation of certain documentation standards the knowledge created will be retrievable and will remain so for a long time. Otherwise the retrieval of information will become a matter of chance due to the limits of fragmented, knowledge producing social groups.
Since several years it has been observed that information offered by different knowledge producing institutions on the internet is more and more interlinked. This tendency will increase, because the fragmented information offers on the internet make the retrieval of information difficult as even impossible. At the same time the quantity of information offered on the internet grows exponentially in Europe – and elsewhere - due to many digitization projects. Insofar as funding institutions base the acceptance of projects on the observation of certain documentation standards the knowledge created will be retrievable and will remain so for a longer time. Otherwise the retrieval of information will become a matter of chance due to the limits of fragmented, knowledge producing social groups.