The term Heritage according to the International Council of Museums (ICOM) in 2005, refers to the entire corpus of material signs either artistic or symbolic handed on by the past to each culture and therefore to the whole of humankind.
This includes both the human and the natural environment, architectural complexes, and archaeological sites, not only the rural heritage and the countryside but also the urban, technical, or industrial heritage, industrial design, and street furniture.
Cultural Heritage can be seen as of world, regional, national or local importance for instance United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). World Heritage Convention (UNESCO, 1972) defines the cultural heritage of world value as “Architectural works, works of monumental sculpture and painting, elements or structures of an archaeological nature, inscriptions, cave dwellings and combinations of features which are of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art or science; works of man or the combined works of nature and man.
These areas include “Archaeological sites which are of Outstanding Universal Value from the historical, aesthetic, ethnological or anthropological point of view”.
It is worth noting that cultural heritage is closely related to the concept of value – which is considered in two dimensions, one, scope of interest (from local to global) and particular area of contribution (historical, aesthetic ethnological as well as anthropological). Therefore, the preservation of the culture now covers the non-physical cultural heritage, which includes the signs and symbols passed on by oral transmission, artistic and literary forms of expression. Languages, ways of life, myths, beliefs and rituals, value systems, and traditional knowledge and know-how. If peradventure I was asked a personal question about the total of what cultural heritage implies, my honest answer would be that the term cultural heritage designates monuments, groups of buildings, not modern or sites of historical, aesthetic, archaeological, anthropological, or ethnological and scientific value which involves the totality of what mankind has acknowledged over decades of life existence as a way of life.
Haven explains what cultural heritage means and entails. The next issue to deal with, is what is cultural heritage institution? These are areas across the globe where these memories of cultural heritages are kept or holders and preservers of cultural heritages. These institutions range from Museums, Galleries of Arts, Libraries, and Archives of various types and sizes. They are the lab where the incubation, conservation, and preservation of cultural policies and managers take legal concerns and harness our historical potentials and cultural values.
When discussing cultural heritage as of today, all these institutions mentioned have their respective initiatives and standardized models of presentation and preservation. In the past, it was the traditional method of standardization and local display that was the only approach to cultural content. When talking about cultural heritage today, we are talking about the current technological standards. The euphoria from childhood of converting analogue information into digital format is gone. What was invoked in the last decade is that almost all cultural resources use digitalized content to deliver products and services in the creative and information industries in the fastest-growing and changing world. This justifies the efforts of many experts in various domains involved.
As a result, from digitization, a new type of rights evolved. Re-use and contextualizing are crucial for all cultural heritages and always were. There is no change in the principle of curation between institutional environment and its digital alternative. The means, richness and value are different, in favour of the web. The digital world makes contextualizing richer and easier, adding a new layer to it- the layer of the user. The user can create his virtual collections in minutes, learn the stories behind the object of his/her interest, organize and re-use his personal collections, share with others, print, and so on. Usually, all these options are always in most institutions available for free. However, there is always a colon for acknowledgement from the institutions that originated or from which such collections are obtained.
The initiatives differ from one institution to another. The requirements must not also be the same. When you look at objects from a specific collection, the way it is stored and presented, it will not be correct for someone to make a comparison. The Mission and vision of such organization might be similar but equally differ for the purpose it might have to achieve. Right management for digital heritage can be synchronized beyond the scope of intellectual property rights. The materials are too complex and sometimes contradictory and have to take into consideration wide spectrum of issues of commercial, cultural, ethical, historical, moral, religious, or spiritual in nature. So far, the idea of cultural heritage has been given a significant explanation as well as the institutions involved while the standards and initiatives of these institutions have briefly been touched. What we should emphasize right now is “WHAT IS DIGITISATION”?
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the first known use of the verb digitize dates from 1953. Nowadays meaning of digitization is the “conversion of analogue information in any form (text, photographs, voice, etc) to digital form with electronic devices (scanners, cameras) so that the information can be processed, stored and transmitted through digital circuits, equipment and networks”. It therefore means an integration of digital technologies into everyday life by the digitization of everything that can be digitized.
The second definition is wider and applies fully to cultural heritage, new terms appeared as a result of mass digitization at the beginning of XXI century – “Digital Heritage”, “Digital Humanities” and “Digital Curation”.
Copyright, authorship and intellectual property rights concern three pillars of digital heritage, but as for digitization, there are four points that need clarification at the start of each digitization project. Which are “who and under what conditions holds the rights for e-storage, e-presentation, e-access and e-distribution including e-commerce of digitized artifacts.
Digitization techniques depend on the type of object; is it text, photograph, architecture, audio, video, and so on. Digitization technology consists of specialized Hardware, software and networks, technical infrastructure including protocols and standards, and presupposes policies and procedures (for workflow, maintenance, security, upgrades, etc). For instance, in digitizing art collections, interesting results have been achieved by using not only photographs and video but X-ray, 3D, and Laser Scans, Infrared, and UV. One comprehensive survey in this direction was proposed by David Stork in 2008, in the field of digitizing 3D objects reality-based on photogrammetry where Laser scanning technology was used and which employed hardware and software to metrically survey the reality as it is, documenting in 3D the actual visible situation of a site by means of images, range – data CAD drawing and maps, classical surveying or an integration of the aforementioned technique.
However, there are three building blocks of digital heritage, the basic activities that are vital for creating using and sustenance of digital heritage are digitization, access and preservation. We have sufficiently explained digitization, which leads us to “Access”. Access to digital cultural heritage means first of all efficient and initiative resources for discovery tools. This not only means that the users can “see” an object. The efforts for developing metadata schemas basically serve this domain because without high-quality metadata, the discovery of digital objects is impossible. One particularly interesting recent trend is the use of content-based information retrieval methods for cultural heritage. For example, the project “AXES” works on methods for generating metadata on video and audio objects, using image analysis, and speech analysis of subtitles in videos. This is an example of an integrated project, which brings together several different methods for content-based retrieval. The environment is also a determinant in this case, it caters for interoperability among many different applications just like the Bulgarian Folklore Artery which allows the virtual presentation of Bulgarian folk cultural heritage using advanced knowledge-based technologies.
The creation of knowledge-based technology is not merely based on the development of appropriate models and implementations but required new business models which address the issues of value for the users and appropriate cost revenue case of creation and delivery of digital objects for the cultural heritage domain.
For instance, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) is an exemplary case of how a museum should work in a digital environment and use web technologies for its benefit. This is where standards also apply. The standards for museums provide adequate systems for metadata description of museum objects. CDWA (Categories for the Description of Works of Art) was established by the College of Art Association in 1990. It consists of categories with 505 metadata for the description of artworks (objects and images). The standard has a lightweight version CDWA lite.
FDA Guide is Foundation for Documents of Architecture from 1994 is an expansion of CDWA which is intended to describe architectural documents and contains 92 metadata, split into 5 categories. While the standard object ID of John Paul Getty Trust since 1999 is a small subset of CDWA.
The Standard Museumdat was created by the Institute for Museumsforschung in 2006 for the extraction and automatic publication of basic metadata in the museum gates. The standard is a summary of CDWA lite and consists of 5 categories with 114 metadata. Then the standard SPECTRUM which was developed by Museums in Britain in 2007 because of the bulky character of the standard (it contains 481 metadata) a lighter version of SPECTRUM essentials was developed for small museums. Besides metadata, SPECTRUM contains a description of the 21 museum procedures, accompanied by the necessary supporting data. The LIDO (light information describing objects) is a new standard from 2009, established on the basis of CDWA lite. CIDOC CRM, Museumdat and SPECTRUM consist of 12 categories with 75 metadata. The standard is used by the Athena project.
Therefore Business model of the web used widely by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET) and other American museums is based on open access to free content (text, video, photo music) generated by museum visitors on social networks. User-generated content is highly regarded by people because it is free of institutional and other types of control and policy. This is only one of a handful of museums that have created comprehensive online access to all catalogued works. As part of a broader effort to support its commitment to online visitors and build and encourage its relationship with them.
Most museums like ours “National Commission for Museums and Monuments Benin City also operates e-mail marketing and social media programs that provide content and interactive experiences. More than one million fans followers and subscribers interact with our museum daily on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. We are also a member of the Google Art Project, which draws Google’s broader internet audience straight to our galleries and collections.
Finally, our digital preservation to ensure that objects can be located rendered used, and understood in the future is not questionable as there are more professional pieces of training to cope with the latest developments in terms of research digitally to maintain the status quo. All these areas need much technical work on digitization and organization to be done in parallel with applying of more complex view so that digitization can give more life cycle information to our cultural heritage.
Wasa Gertrude Mobunubhata, Assistant Director Museums, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, writes From Benin City.
