Papers 6Chair: Marius Snyders Marius Snyders (Institute for Sound and Vision, The Netherlands)
In papers 6, there will be three speakers: Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), Canada
New Roles and Challenges in the Improvement of Online Access Speaker: Madeleine Lafaille
This presentation focuses on the evolving role of heritage organizations, and more precisely on the efforts currently being made to improve access to collections and other online heritage content. More specifically, it will examine current practices and challenges in matters dealing with browsing, retrieval and customized reuse of heritage resources on the Web. The emphasis will lie on national portals and their transformation.
In museums, the collection has always been at the heart of their mission and activities.Museums acquire, manage, protect and present artefacts in order to preserve our collective memory. They also promote public access for the purposes of education and enjoyment. Gaining a better understanding of our heritage collections invariably helps us to protect them better. Until now, this is what has prompted museums to carry out inventory projects while, at the same time, acquiring high-performance electronic collection management systems. The creation of a national inventory of museum artefacts has been a result of these custodial efforts. Today, the Artefacts Canada inventory provides free, one-stop online access to information, in the form of a centralized database to which museums can contribute a core subset of information on their collections.
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 Madeleine Lafaille is a Heritage Information Analyst with the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN). She has been working for several years as a specialist in the field of museum collection documentation and digitization. As such, she has worked on the development and application of metadata and vocabulary standards for museum collections, and has supervised various projects on the creation of digital heritage content in museums. After completing a B.A. in History and Anthropology, Madeleineobtained a Master’s degree in Museology at the Université de Montréal, before undertaking a Ph.D. in Information Science. Her research interests focus on knowledge organization and the semantic interoperability of information as they pertain to heritage content. She is also interested in the convergence of information between library, archival and museum collections.
Speaker: Trilce Navarrete Hernandez
This paper will propose an approach to identify digitization activities and to estimate their costs.
We are entering an economic recession of which the total implications we will only begin to see. The heritage sector is faced with severe resource constraints. Archive managers must therefore use available resources as efficiently and effectively as possible. Informed decisions can be made when data is available.
The exercise of identifying the costs on production of digital materials can be a valuable reflecting tool for the organization. For instance, in order to estimate the size of the collection to be digitized and plan funds accordingly, it is necessary to know the size of the current collection, per type of object and preferably with additional information as its location and its state (does digitization require high preparation and conservation measures? This would influence costs).
Tracing a process can tell a lot about an organization. Mapping the production and costs of digitization results in clarity of the work process, and resources utilized, for higher-level analysis and strategic planning. Most importantly, understanding the digitization process is an important step to reach active sustainability and ultimately increase access to heritage.
Categories on costs must clearly define what is being measured to assure consistency. For instance, do costs and production data include the so-called ‘born-digital’ objects? Costs on staff for digital activities could represent management and sustainability of digital data that was originated in digital format, while production of ‘making digital’ would inaccurately reflect a cost-product relationship. This paper will discuss the place of digital activities in a heritage organization and propose an approach to identify related cost
factors.
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 Trilce Navarrete Hernández has collaborated with museums for the past 8 years specializing in digital heritage and museum informatics. As researcher and project coordinator, Trilce has supported efforts to raise awareness of project financing at institutional, national and international level for various projects including The Digital Facts. She is currently a PhD researcher and lecturer at the University of Amsterdam, in the Culture and Information Science Program, department of Mediastudies, where she investigates the evolution of systems to document and to access cultural heritage in the Netherlands. Trilce holds an MA in Cultural Economics from Erasmus University Rotterdam and an MA in Museum Management from the University of Oregon. Areas of interest include the impact of new technologies in the economics of museums, national digital heritage accounts, online interactivity and digital content management.
Speaker: Bart Ooghe
The addition of a digital facet to the documentary lifecycle has forced memory institutions to address a number of management challenges. Can all that passes the test of appraisal also remain stored indefinitely? At what point do digital collections become too large to handle? And what are the relationships between analog collections and their digitised counterparts, when for many users the latter have become the prime access-point to heritage collections? This presentation focuses on the issue of selecting analog documents for digitisation. After two decades of digitisation programmes, no clear-set frame of reference yet exists which might provide a stable context for this decision-making process. Guidelines vary in their respective scopes and current practices are characterised by disparate approaches, differences in terminology and often a lack of open communication on the decisions that are being made. Some also suggest that the question of selection for digitisation is no longer relevant given the ease at which digital copies can be made.
In hopes of providing a more stable ground from which to approach selection, the Flemish government-funded research programme BOM-vlaanderen (Bewaring en Ontsluiting van Multimediale Data in Vlaanderen) conducted a close reading of guidelines and current practices in selection. From this research, this presentation presents a set of common criteria, concerns and incentives for selection that can be understood to underly the present diversity of practices. Formulating these through a case-independent terminology the presentation aims to provide a more stable foothold for selection practices across institutions and sectors. Stressing the benefits of cross-institutional dialogue, it also argues for a more open approach to selection as a vital part of good governance.
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Bart Ooghe has a BA in History and an MA and Ph.D. in Archaeology. From April 2008 to June 2009 he was attached to VTi (the Flemish Theatre Institute) as researcher on the BOM-vl project (Preservation and Access to Multimedia Data in Flanders), during which time he conducted an international study on current practices in selection for digitisation within memory institutions and the media. The resulting report can be downloaded at 
