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.