PRINCIPLES OF THE DIGITAL HERITAGE
| dc.contributor.author | Layton, Roger | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2012-06-14T12:20:54Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2012-06-14T12:20:54Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2012-06-14 | |
| dc.description.abstract | We were commissioned in late 2009 to create the National Policy on Digitization for the Department of Arts and Culture. This policy was subjected to public participation in early 2011, receiving positive comment and critique, and has now moved onto the next stage in its life cycle. As the project leader for this policy development I can now look back and reflect on the processes that led to the formulation of the recommendations and in particular how I envisioned the future of digital repositories and libraries. I made a specific point in the policy that heritage has the longest agenda of any human activity, which could be seen as eternal, with our largest group of stakeholders being future generations. Whereas libraries have been in existence for thousands of years, these have always involved the management of physical books and related documents, and the manner in which libraries are managed and administered has changed very little in this time. Computers have only a 60-year history, and initial computerized systems were primarily used for library administration and indexing. It was only with the introduction of the first digital networks and the World Wide Web that it was possible to share and cross-reference electronic documents using digital networks . The Digitization Policy was the core output of our work with the Department of Arts and Culture, and provided the key policy statement on how to enable a long-term digital heritage that was preserved and was accessible, and for which the issues of intellectual property were clarified. However, there were many other outputs that derived from this policy, including a collection of best practices associated with the digital heritage in all of its forms. I called this the Digital Heritage Body of Knowledge (DHBOK) and this was structured into the core areas of Principles, People, Processes, and Practices. In this paper I focus on the Principles which form the basis on which key decisions can be made when confronted with the plethora of choices that do confront organisations during various processes within the digital heritage. I could not prescribe a single set of choices or priorities that would cover every situation and every context, but I did manage to formulate a general set of principles to guide decision-making. The outcome was a set of 15 such Principles, drawn from extensive research of the available literature, of current practices and standards, and from interviews with key local and international stakeholders. These are the key Principles that define the notion of “success” within any digital heritage project, no matter whether this is a digital library, digital archive or virtual museum. | en_ZA |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10539/11517 | |
| dc.subject | eHeritage, digital heritage, oral history documentation, digitization policy, Linked Data, Web 3.0, Semantic Web, RDF, liberation struggle, victims of conflict, biographies | en_ZA |
| dc.title | PRINCIPLES OF THE DIGITAL HERITAGE | en_ZA |
| dc.type | Other | en_ZA |