Presenter
Enno Meijers (@Enno)
Slides and Recordings
- Slides: 20251118 SWIB 2025 Learning to be patient.pdf (2.1 MB)
- Recordings: YouTube
Abstract
In 2015 the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE) was created to improve the access to cultural heritage information. Supported by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, NDE runs a long term program aimed at increasing the social value of information held by cultural institutions by making their collections more visible, usable and sustainable.
The NDE-program works on creating a nation wide, decentralized network infrastructure for exchange and reuse of digital heritage information. The core of the program is focused on implementing standards and increasing interoperability throughout the network.
In the past ten years we have been working with vendors of collection managements systems to create support for working with persistent identifiers, publishing linked data, use controlled vocabularies and support IIIF APIs.
Technology is only one part of the challenge for creating an networked ecosystem for sharing and using digital heritage information. Provincial heritage organisations and larger institutions play an important role for supporting the implementation process. Digital heritage coaches and data cleaners are employed, data workshops installed and best practices, guidelines, basic courses and tutorials are being developed to guide cultural heritage professionals and voluntary groups on their road to sharing their digital heritage.
In my presentation I will give a brief overview of the results and the lessons learned over the past ten years of working on standardizing technology and processes within the cultural heritage domain in het Netherlands.