Survey the Cultural Standards Landscape
The ATHENA project has just published part of our work for it as an easy to read booklet.
The British Standards Institution (BSI), the world’s oldest standards setting organisation (1901), says:
“Put at its simplest, a standard is an agreed, repeatable way of doing something. It is a published document that contains a technical specification or other precise criteria designed to be used consistently as a rule, guideline, or definition. Standards help to make life simpler and to increase the reliability and the effectiveness of many goods and services we use. Standards are created by bringing together the experience and expertise of all interested parties such as the producers, sellers, buyers, users and regulators of a particular material, product, process or service.”
As part of our work for the ATHENA I carried out a survey of which standards (file formats, metadata and terminology standards) were being used in museums who are providing content to Europeana via the project.
The survey combined information from the over 20 partners of ATHENA. These included museums, libraries and archives, and cultural ministries.
A second outcome was a set of recommendations. The resulting deliverables are:
- D3.1 Report on existing standards applied by European Museums
- D3.2 Recommendations and best practice report
Although these are worth a look the project decided that part of the work, a Standards Landscape, was worth publishing as a separated, designed booklet.
The Landscape’s introduction says:
“Although it is not a complete list of standards currently available and is not covering every sector relevant, we hope it is of practical information for all those interested, as well as instrumental in building more bridges in standards applications for increased interoperability within the cultural heritage sector.”
The booklet is available to:
- 1. Download as a PDF;
- 2. Read online;
- 3. We also have a limited number of printed copies (Please e-mail me (gordon@collectionstrust.org.uk) for a copy).
The Landscape is reccomended to organisations considering which standards to use in their digitisation projects and when they want to deliver content to Europeana.
