EuropeanaTech 2023

Community heritage archives
10-12, 11:10–11:30 (Europe/Amsterdam), Create

Communities facing social, economic or political marginalisation often encounter significant challenges in asserting control over their data. This can be due to limited resources, lack of legal recognition of control, data sharing practices that disregard cultural protocols, online hate and discrimination or consequences of war and disasters.

A use case project of TIB - Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology, the German Documentation Centre for Art History, with the support of SUCHO, and funded by the German Government Commission for Culture and the Media, aims to photographically document endangered and culturally significant buildings in selected regions of Ukraine and make them accessible with descriptive data. The project makes use of Wikibase and provides:
- A secure, currently password-protected database for collecting and enriching information about at-risk buildings.
- A sustainable infrastructure for metadata, preview images and links to the full resolution images stored at Foto Marburg.
- A LIDO.xml2WB transformation process via Python scripts, which can be reconfigured for other projects.
- A multilingual system with version history and persistent identifiers.
- Built-in querying and visualisation platform via SPARQL (in federation with Wikidata or other databases providing an endpoint) with map or timeline views.
- An environment which is connectable for citizen activities in endangered areas and/or for vulnerable communities.

Starting with the pilot in Ukraine mentioned above, an initiative of TIB and Avoin GLAM, Finland, aims to co-design community-managed, privacy-oriented archival data platforms for vulnerable communities to safeguard their cultural heritage. Join this session to learn more.