Culture Knowledge Base

An introduction to digitization for cultural heritage collections. It focuses on digital collection management and explains all the steps involved in the computer-assisted documentation of a collection and the subsequent networking of the data in comprehensive portals.

Recommendations for standardized and systematized documentation of results in provenance research, compiled by the Provenance Research Working Group and receiving a great deal of attention.

The Spectrum documentation standard of the British Collections Trust has set guidelines for the comprehensive documentation of museum objects and all related work processes that are considered exemplary and are applied worldwide.

This document proposes a methodology for integrating the management of digital collections into the existing curatorial and administrative functions of the institution. It is intended as a companion document to the UK Collections Trust's Spectrum documentation standard.

This document presents professional methods for creating the most faithful digital reproductions possible of physical two-dimensional collection items such as texts, plans, maps, graphics, or photographs.Iit also focuses on documenting image-related information in metadata.

This document describes a common standard for descriptive metadata for embedding in broadcast WAVE files, one of the most commonly used container formats for storing audio files. It is accompanied by the BWF MetaEdit tool, which can be used to integrate the metadata.

This document defines guidelines for embedding descriptive metadata in the Digital Picture Exchange (DPX) format for film material, including the core fields defined by the SMPTE ST268 standard for data exchange.

This is an initial guide for institutions wanting to digitize their film resources. It compares a range of film "inputs" and digital "outputs" in the conversion of picture and sound information, and concludes with a sample service description for film-to-video conversion.

These decision-making aids and methodological notes on the production and archiving of born-digital videos focus above all on the sustainability and interoperability of the solutions. Several case studies illustrate the implementation of the recommendations.

The DFG Practical Guidelines formulate standards and provide guidance on organisational, methodological and technical issues in the context of object digitisation and indexing. This document is an updated version of the Practical Guidelines published by the DFG in 2016.

The IANUS Research Data Center for Archaeology and Classical Studies, coordinated by the German Archaeological Institute, has compiled IT recommendations for the sustainable handling of digital data, including recommended formats for 3D data.

CDWA provides easy-to-understand and clear guidelines for structuring information when cataloging art and other cultural heritage objects in collections. It is supplemented by many examples.

CCO is a handbook of guidelines for documenting cultural heritage objects and the visual resources they represent. The focus is on art and architecture, but many other types of culturally relevant objects are also considered.

The publication by Jake Carlson provides instructions on how to use the so-called "toolkit" for documenting research data, as well as templates and examples compiled for free use by Purdue University in the US.

The site provides detailed information on why, how and which research data should be documented in accordance with the FAIR criteria, with regard to formats, vocabularies, languages, protocols, repositories, persistent identifications.

The site explains the benefits of documenting metadata early in the research process, provides a good overview of the steps involved, and references best practices from everyday research.

This resource provides an introduction such as an overview of long-term and sustainable data formats and covers file formats, conversion, compatibility, long-term stability, metadata, and machine readability.

The article provides an overview of the data lifecycle and its individual stages.

The publication identifies concrete data problems in research data on tangible cultural assets. Each problem is described by a structured profile that includes aspects such as the quality dimensions involved, examples, causes and ideas for improvement.

Wikidata is a rapidly growing database on all knowledge domains that has been in existence since 2012 and can be edited by anyone interested or supplemented by automated enrichment. Wikidata represents one of the most important data hubs of the Linked (Open) Data network.

VIAF is an aggregated standards data service with holdings from 57 national libraries and similar providers (as of Aug. 2022). VIAF establishes concordances to an entity via the standards records available for it and offers a URI to this cluster.

The film provides information about the GND as a data collection of authority data from the cultural sciences and as an organizational structure for institutions involved in shaping the GND. It addresses the integration of the GND in international contexts.

LIDO is an XML schema for providing metadata on objects of material culture for various post-use contexts, from online publication to output via interfaces. It supports the full range of descriptive information on cultural property.

The handbook provides graphic collections with guidance for the acquisition of data and its integration into cross-collection contexts. It looks at the perspective of scientific description of the goods and that of the informational organisation of the data.

The LIDO Handbook is dedicated to objects of the genres painting and sculpture and is an application profile of the internationally established metadata standard LIDO, which serves as a guide for structuring information in local collection management systems.

ISIL records identifiers for libraries, archives, museums and related institutions within the globally applied ISIL identification system. The German ISIL agency is the Berlin State Library. The data are provided with addresses and georeferenced.

Iconclass is a comprehensive classification system for the indexing of representational content in pictorial collections that is used in museums, libraries and research projects worldwide. It is particularly suitable for indexing Western art.

The Hornbostel-Sachs system is a classification system for musical instruments. It has been the international standard since the 1970s. The system was updated and expanded in 2011 as part of the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) project.

The Getty Research Institute offers several coordinated structured subject vocabularies for the arts and cultural studies. ULAN is a vocabulary of over 527,000 artists and arts-related individuals and entities (as of Nov. 2021).

The Getty Research Institute offers several coordinated structured subject vocabularies for the arts and cultural studies. The TGN lists georeferenced entries for 2.5 million geographies worldwide with a focus on historical places (as of Nov. 2021).

Das Getty Research Institute bietet mehrere aufeinander abgestimmte strukturierte Fachvokabulare für die Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften. Der AAT ist ein mehrsprachiger, hierarchisch strukturierter Thesaurus mit über 72.000 Allgemeinbegriffen (Nov. 2021). 

The Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND) offers the largest openly licensed pool of German-language authority data on individual terms, such as persons, corporate bodies, events, geographies and artistic works, but also on general terms in the form of subject headings.

The page explains the FAIR principles quickly and clearly. On the one hand, it describes the tasks involved in creating FAIR research data, and on the other hand, it presents the requirements for repositories to offer FAIR data.

As an application ontology, the Erlangen CRM / OWL is an interpretation of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model. 
It is the authoritative application ontology of CRM in the German-speaking world and important, e. g., for data stewards carry out implementations on the basis of…

This task sheet for beginners contains eight key tasks on research data management, from data capture to publication: Data Management Plan, Data Structuring and Naming, Data Selection, File Formats, Metadata/README File, Legal Aspects, License Selection, Repository Selection.