Management and re-use
The content preserved by meemoo comes from various Flemish media, cultural and government organisations. They remain the content owner and manager even after it’s been digitised and imported into our systems. This means they remain responsible for a number of core processes in the content life cycle:
Performing quality control on digitised content;
Adding metadata to the content;
Valuation and selection within a collection;
(Re-)using the content by making a high- or low-resolution export, or using the technical interfaces.
Management via the meemoo archive system
Our content partners’ archivists and collection managers can rely on the meemoo archive system to perform these core processes. Among other things, this system includes a media player to view content and a search interface to find it. All metadata, including the aforementioned PREMIS data – which records which user or application has carried out which action on which file – is available through this application.
Metadata
One of the most important elements for re-using content is the supporting metadata that accompanies the files. A file that is not described can’t be found. So in order to ensure that all our content partners’ collections can be searched in a uniform way, meemoo has developed a metadata model in consultation with its content partners. You can find the list of available fields, the mapping of these fields to existing standards, and the interpretation of these fields, here (in Dutch).
Content partners are responsible for adding metadata to the archived content within the metadata model. However, because we have such a large volume of content, we are conducting research to explore how meemoo can use techniques within artificial intelligence and machine learning, such as speech recognition, facial recognition, entity recognition and crowdsourcing, to create metadata or facilitate metadata enrichment through the use of our tools, e.g. the Public Domain Tool.
Re-use on a larger scale via APIs
Meemoo provides technical interfaces or APIs to be able to organise re-use on a larger scale. Again, we work with open and well-described standards as much as possible here. The APIs are used by content partners to access their collections through their own website or other platforms. The Museum of Industry, for example, uses the interface to display its born-digital and digitised content automatically, in a flexible way, on its own platform.
Meemoo also uses the APIs itself, for example to make content available on a platform such as The Archive for Education. You can find an overview of the available APIs here (in Dutch).
We’re also focusing on IIIF as a good practice for making content and metadata available online. We share knowledge with the sector for this, for example during the IIIF Fridays. We have also gained practical experience in a number of IIIF projects. In the future, we want to apply this experience for concrete purposes ourselves: the updated hetarchief.be (June 2024) will use IIIF to make image content accessible, and we are also setting up a service for our content partners to use the IIIF image API (link in Dutch) and presentation API (autumn 2024) (link in Dutch).