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.

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.

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.

The guide focuses on the identification of cultural property that was seized as a result of persecution during the National Socialist regime. It provides practice-oriented information on the goals, scientific methods and issues of provenance research.

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.

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.

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

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 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.