A Data Infrastructure for Digital Cultural Heritage: Characteristics, Requirements and Priority Services

The European amount of digitized material is growing very rapidly, as National, regional and European programmes support the digitization processes by Museums, Libraries, Archives, Archaeological sites and Audiovisual repositories. The generation of digital cultural heritage is accelerated also by the impulse of Europeana that is fostering the European cultural institutions to produce even more digital content. Moreover digital cultural heritage content is complex and interlinked through many relations. European countries are working for the future, in order to create a data infrastructure devoted to cultural heritage research. Currently, Europe has 2 twin-projects (DC-NET and INDICATE) ongoing and a new international coordination action is under preparation to design a validated Roadmap for the preservation of digital cultural content. These initiatives are contributing to smooth the way to the Open Science Infrastructure for Digital Cultural Heritage which is foreseen in 2020. 1. The Digital Cultural Heritage sector: characteristics and needs Since early 2000s, a wide range of activities was carried out by the European Member States in order to accept the challenge of driving the European Cultural Heritage through the digital age. Digital evolution of the Cultural Heritage field has accelerated rapidly in the past few years. Massive digitization and annotation activities are in progress all over Europe and the world, following the early developments at the European level [1] and the “Lund principles” [2]. Furthermore, the strong involvement of companies like Google, together with the positive reaction and increasing support of the European Union, have led to a variety of, rather converging, actions towards multimodal and multimedia cultural content generation from all possible sources (i.e. galleries, libraries, archives, museums, audiovisual archives etc.). The creation and evolution of Europeana [3] as a unique point of access to European Cultural Heritage, has been one of the major achievements of these efforts. At the moment, more than 20 million objects, expressing the European cultural richness, are accessible through the Europeana portal, and it is expected that this number will be doubled within the next five years. The matter has 2 faces: on one side, the Memory Institutions (museums, archives and libraries at first, but also Archaeological sites and Audiovisual repositories) feel the unavoidable need of digitizing their content, both for preserving it in a digital format and for granting and enlarging the access to them by researchers, students and citizens. It is esteemed that only a very small part of the European cultural heritage had been digitized until now, therefore there is a lot of work to do and memory institutions are bearing big efforts to carry on this huge deal. A growing number of projects for digitization is supporting the process and indeed the cultural heritage sector is going through wide transformations and changes. On the other side, furthermore, our society is like never before accumulating a huge amount of digital-born material (result data from the research, materials‟ analysis, digital art, bibliographies and so on). The digital-born heritage is therefore adding data and content to the digitization process output. The volume of digital cultural heritage data is incredibly growing year after year, so that it became immediately necessary to reflect upon the tools which permit to manage such a huge amount of data in an efficient and selective way, in order to make the data available to the researchers and the citizens in a European dimension, and towards a global dimension too. The first issue which was felt of immediate importance, also considering that each of the Member States had its own methodology and procedures, had been building a shared platform of recommendations and guidelines and developing common data models and services. To this aim, 2 major projects (Minerva [4] and Michael [5]) permitted to have the proper basis from which two branches had started. First branch, towards citizens: the flagship project of digitization process that produced data, made available for all the citizen is Europeana, which holds a series of related projects: projects to add content to Europeana itself, projects to develop tools and guidelines and to manage all the upcoming content properly and accordingly, and projects for parallel uses of Europeana contents. Second branch, towards researchers of Cultural Heritage: the research in the cultural heritage sector is rapidly transforming into a data-based science and therefore it is becoming more and more crucial to develop dedicated e-infrastructures which will enhance the research and will facilitate the researchers‟ workflow. See Fig. 1: European projects overview. In the end, Digital Cultural Heritage (DCH) content is extremely complex and interlinked through many relations, and there is a growing feeling that Europe actually needs to create a space for research in the sector. Therefore, the needs of DCH sector are : high quality information technology management, to ensure trust, availability, reliability, long-term safety of content, security, preservation and sustainability; enhanced access facilities i. to the researchers who will look for contents into the DCH e-Infrastructure for their research; ii. to the cultural institutions that will deliver their data to the DCH eInfrastructure; interoperation among existing cultural heritage repositories, among cultural portals and among data from the digital cultural heritage and from the research. 2. The vision towards a DCH data infrastructure The e-infrastructure for DCH is not going to be a “new infrastructure”, but it should be instead conceived as a “new approach” based on the interoperation and federation of national and regional systems, with the scope of valorizing existing resources. The keyword is interoperability among National, Regional and Thematic systems. The embracing of the e-Infrastructures by the digital cultural heritage community will open new scenarios of use and exploitation with an impacts expected on different