LIDO Agency

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LIDO (Lightweight Information Describing Objects) is an international metadata format for the description, publication and exchange of data on cultural heritage objects. Museums, collections and other cultural heritage institutions use LIDO to provide their object data in a structured format so that it can be accessed publicly on portals such as the German Digital Library or the Culture Knowledge Graph.

As service of the NFDI4Culture consortium, the LIDO Agency offers advice, information and networking opportunities relating to LIDO and is actively involved in national and international standardisation bodies. The service is aimed at everyone who works with LIDO – from museums, collections, libraries and archives, through heritage authorities and research projects, to software providers, portals and aggregators.

Collaborations with local, regional and national partners support us in our core tasks. These include, amongst others:

other NFDI consortia (notably NFDI4Objects and Text+),
the Minimum Record Working Group,
Museum Desk, Media Desk, and Heritage Conservation Desk of the German Digital Library (DDB),
the Institute for Museum Research,
the Hessian Museum Association,
the digiCULT network,
the Berlin Research and Competence Centre for Digitisation (digiS),
the German Museum Association (Documentation Section),
the Coordination Office for Academic University Collections
and the SODa Data Competence Centre.

Contact:

Dr. Celia Krause (Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte - Bildarchiv Foto Marburg)

Dr. Domenic Schäfer (Verbundzentrale des GBV)

e-mail: lido-servicestelle@lists.gbv.de

Events

Workshop of the ICOM Documentation LIDO Working Group: “The LIDO Terminology and Related Vocabularies” - Online session after the ICOM Documentation International Conference in Brussels 2026. More information

We provide advice on all matters relating to LIDO. If you are interested, please consult the NFDI4Culture helpdesk.
We provide support in the development of funding applications and digitisation projects, which can be used to finance, for example, the implementation of LIDO or the development of LIDO application profiles.
Training & Guidance
Through practical workshops, we share in-depth knowledge with our target groups. In this way, we support them in creating high-quality LIDO data. Further information can be found under ‘Events and News’.
Our LIDO resources (workshop slides, sample solutions, best-practice recommendations, etc.) are made available free of charge to all target groups.

Through practical workshops, we share in-depth knowledge with our target groups. In this way, we support them in creating high-quality LIDO data. Further information can be found under ‘Events and News’.
Our resources on LIDO (workshop slides, sample solutions, best-practice recommendations, etc.) are made available free of charge to all target groups (see: Zenodo Community of NFDI4Culture).

One of our main priorities is to ensure and improve the quality of LIDO data in accordance with the FAIR Principles and Europeana Metadata Tiers. Quality-assured LIDO data forms the basis for its re-use, including in the Culture Knowledge Graph.
On request, we provide feedback on the status of your data offerings and recommend suitable tools and procedures for improving data quality.

We are actively involved, amongst others, in the LIDO-DE AG of the Fachgruppe Dokumentation of the German Museum Association and in the international ICOM Documentation (formerly CIDOC) LIDO Working Group, where we contribute ideas on the further development of the LIDO standard and LIDO terminology.