NCD Recommendation for the National Standard for Describing Digitized Heritage in Serbia

Cultural Heritage Digitization in Serbia: Standards, Policies, and Case Studies

“…The beginning of the new millennium was marked by attempts by the cultural institutions in Serbia to integrate the process of digitization into their missions and services, and the largest ones such as the National Library of Serbia got involved in large-scope digitization projects (for example, in 2004, the National Library of Serbia hosted the international conference dedicated to the European project "CALIMERA" [15,16], and in 2005, it was a coordinator of the project "Serbian children's digital library" [17], which came from a wider international project "ICDL-International Children's Digital Library" [18]). In addition, in 2004, the NCD participated in the establishment of an international network of institutions and individuals interested in digitization of cultural heritage in the territory of Southeastern Europe, entitled "South-Eastern European Digitization Initiative" [19] and in 2006 represented Serbia at the convention of EU member states dedicated to digitization within the "MINERVA" and "MICHAEL" networks of the ministries of EU member states in charge of cultural policies (In 2002, a network of the ministries of culture of EU member states was established entitled "MINERVA" with the task to coordinate digitization projects in the field of cultural heritage [20]. Soon afterwards, joint initiatives were launched, such as for example "MICHAEL", in order to create a portal that would enable simple and quick access to digital holdings of cultural institutions in European countries [20], and "EUROPEANA", a common source of cultural heritage of Europe [7]) [21,22].…”

“…Nonetheless, the work on the establishment of a mechanism of coordination among national digitization projects proceeded slowly. Given the lack of a national strategy and guidelines in the area of the digitization of cultural heritage, cultural institutions proceeded to complete digitization projects either on their own strength (e.g., the Historical Museum of Serbia created its own database for managing museum documentation, which was subsequently adopted by a group of museums [23]) or have sought outside assistance (e.g., the University Library in Belgrade turned to international initiatives such as "EUROPEANA" for the exchange of knowledge necessary for successful realization of projects in the field of digitization of cultural and scientific heritage [24]), while a number of cultural institutions have decided not to engage in digitization projects until clear guidelines have been defined at the state level (in the chronological framework from 1995 to the present, cultural heritage digitization projects by cultural and scientific institutions in Serbia can roughly be classified into the following categories: foundations and definitions (e.g., [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32]); overviews and surveys (e.g., [10,19,21,[33][34][35][36][37][38][39]), pilot projects (e.g., [40][41][42]), projects of presentations of cultural and scientific heritage (e.g., ), applications in education (e.g., [66][67][68]), analysis of data stored in developed databases (e.g., [69][70][71]), and as chapters of MSc and PhD theses (e.g., [72,73])). The consequence of all this was that digitization projects by cultural institutions in Serbia differed in standards and systems for describing and managing cultural heritage they adhered to, presenting a challenge for consistency and the possibility of migration, as well as protection, preserv...…”

“…Furthermore, an object representing a book can belong to several collections (instances of the class Collection); instances of the class Controlled term can be used as meta-data for describing the book, etc. This format was accepted as a part of the Guidelines for Digitization of Cultural Heritage (for more information on the metadata proposal scheme, please refer to [29,30,32,80,81]) [2].…”

A Distributed Catalog for Digitized Cultural Heritage

“…By connecting different kinds of data providers into one system, the quality of the resulting information can be increased. In this paper, we consider a distributed catalog which contains only meta-data on digital documents which follows a part of the Recommendation for the meta-data format for describing digitized heritage, described in [7]. One of the main reasons for this is the intellectual property rights issue.…”

“…Given all of the aforementioned, the Committee for digitization of the UNESCO commission of Serbia has recognized the meta-data problem as the most sophisticated one in the cataloging phase of digitization. During the past years, some efforts were made in the field of standardization, which resulted in the development of the recommendation for the meta-data format described in [7], but this recommendation has not, still, been accepted as a formal national standard.…”