• Publicationsclose
• Other research productsclose
• 2017-2021close
• Open Access close
• Article close
• DARIAH EU close
• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage close

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) started in October 2010 to build on a network that connects both people (Holocaust researchers, archivists, curators, librarians and digital humanists) and dispersed Holocaust source material and collections. EHRI’s aim is making sources visible in a systematic way in order to counteract the fragmentation of the sources and to reveal interconnections. EHRI focuses on Archive and collection descriptions, which are available through the EHRI Portal. EHRI is currently in its second phase and is on the ESFRI Roadmap2 for a more sustainable future. EHRI has developed a set of controlled vocabularies that serves both as a retrieval and cataloguing tool for the multilingual and highly heterogeneous data of the EHRI portal. These vocabularies were partly implemented in the first phase of the project. In the current phase of EHRI the vocabularies are in the process of quality improvement improve and enrich the existing terms, add new terms, disambiguate and remove the mistakes (deduplication, merging, adding multilingual labels, consistency checks, multiple parent relations, etc.) and increase their coverage. In the EHRI portal the subject terms are currently not available for the public, as they are used only for retrieval purposes.

AbstractThe paper presents Intergraph, a graph-based visual analytics technical demonstrator for the exploration and study of content in historical document collections. The designed prototype is motivated by a practical use case on a corpus of circa 15.000 digitized resources about European integration since 1945. The corpus allowed generating a dynamic multilayer network which represents different kinds of named entities appearing and co-appearing in the collections. To our knowledge, Intergraph is one of the first interactive tools to visualize dynamic multilayer graphs for collections of digitized historical sources. Graph visualization and interaction methods have been designed based on user requirements for content exploration by non-technical users without a strong background in network science, and to compensate for common flaws with the annotation of named entities. Users work with self-selected subsets of the overall data by interacting with a scene of small graphs which can be added, altered and compared. This allows an interest-driven navigation in the corpus and the discovery of the interconnections of its entities across time.

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal website aims to aggregate digitally available archival descriptions concerning the Holocaust. This portal is actually a meta-catalogue, or an information aggregator, whose biggest goal is to have up-to-date information by means of building sustainable data pipelines between EHRI and its content providers. Just like in similar archival information aggregators (e.g. Archives Portal Europe or Monasterium), the XML-based metadata standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) plays a key role. The article presents how EADs are imported into the portal, mainly thanks to the Open Archive Initiative protocols.

This article shows that metadata plays a central role in our society and concludes that through collaborative work, it is possible to pool solutions and to establish relationships of cooperation, both at the level of practical tool development and with regard to sharing and creating knowledge and know-how. ispartof: ABB: Archives et Bibliothèques de Belgique - Archief- en Bibliotheekwezen in België vol:106 pages:135-144 status: published

International audience

More and more cultural institutions use Linked Data principles to share and connect their collection metadata. In the archival field, initiatives emerge to exploit data contained in archival descriptions and adapt encoding standards to the semantic web. In this context, online authority files can be used to enrich metadata. However, relying on a decentralized network of knowledge bases such as Wikidata, DBpedia or even Viaf has its own difficulties. This paper aims to offer a critical view of these linked authority files by adopting a close-reading approach. Through a practical case study, we intend to identify and illustrate the possibilities and limits of RDF triples compared to institutions' less structured metadata. Workshop "Dariah "Trust and Understanding: the value of metadata in a digitally joined-up world" (14/05/2018, Brussels), preprint of the submission to the journal "Archives et Biblioth\`eques de Belgique"

International audience

International audience

International audience; The National Library Ivan Vazov in Plovdiv is the second largest library in Bulgaria. It serves asthe second national legal depository of Bulgarian printed works. In addition, it has contributedsignificantly to the preservation and the digital accessibility of the national cultural andhistorical heritage. This article offers an overview of the library’s history and currentdevelopments in the field of automation and digitization.