The Repository of Digital Cultural Heritage within the Croatian Project e-Culture: the Central System

Abstract

The Central System was developed within the e-Culture project with the purpose of establishing a digital repository of cultural heritage. The advantage of the Central System is that it contains all records in one place. Naturally, each institution can manage only its own digital content. The success of a digitization project above all else depends on the quality training of the employees who manage digital content within the System. The paper strives to outline the System and explain the principle of work within it. It also concerns experiences of the Croatian State Archives in practice, with an overview of potential challenges in everyday work.
The Central System comprises of the following basic processes: digitization, long-term digital preservation and permanent storage. It applies various metadata standards, standards for formatting and displaying digital contents that enable easier search and interaction with users. Via its web interface the System offers e-services which enable users to access digitized archives of heritage institutions. This intuitive interface makes it easier to manage digitized content. The interface comprises of the functionalities which are accessible via the menu on the toolbar – Catalogue, Search, Ingest, Administration and Planning. The System offers the service of viewing digitized records via the Catalogue functionality, the service of searching for records via the Search function, the service of importing the IT packages via the Ingest function, as well as the functionality pertaining to work oversight and administration of packages via the Administration function. The most important advantage of the System is that it enables permanent storage of digitized archives and more efficient implementation of complex digitization projects, such as e-Culture, which features numerous and various users, as well as institutions. Quicker accessibility and easier use of archives are contemporary priorities and this system endeavours to satisfy such needs. With time, systems such as this will become indispensable for the functioning of archives.