Culture Knowledge Base

The Ground Truth Guidelines have grown out of the DFG-funded initiative for Optical Character Recognition Development. They address the creation of ground truth, i. e. reference data for the development and evaluation of OCR systems.

Specifications for the digitization of two-dimensional materials such as manuscripts, books, newspapers, and magazines, but also photographs, paintings, and graphic sheets. They are technically oriented and refer exclusively to the image quality and metadata of the primary file.

The "Masterplan Zeitungsdigitalisierung" summarizes the experiences and results of the DFG project "Digitalisierung historischer Zeitungen" and includes a summary of the most important recommendations.

The European Impact Centre of Competence in Digitisation has published this best practice guide to OCR. The guide provides an introduction to OCR and is more technical in nature, a bit older, but thorough.

This technical report of the Dutch Pure3D project of 2021 provides a comparably up-to-date state of the art compilation of available scientific 3D web infrastructures. The survey is complemented by user requirements, guidelines and recommendations.

The document contains both the 2019 survey of 3D content in Europeana as well as a set of recommendations. Although the survey was limited to the content available in Europeana at that time, the results and recommendations can be generalized in principle.

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.

An older, but still valid set standard to Web Annotations, which serves as a basis for various projects.

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.

This 2020 European Commission report identifies ten basic questions and principles that researchers should ask themselves before deciding to go 3D digitizing.

The 2018 publication contains inspiration for advancing the field of OCR for scientific research, handling historical texts as well as manuscripts, and key recommendations on OCR.