Primeur: Flemish Institute for Archives digitises over 800,000 heritage items

The vast scale and variety of heritage items in this digitisation initiative make it the first of its kind. In collaboration with 175 partners, meemoo has digitised more than 800,000 Flemish heritage objects over two years.

Valuable heritage displayed in a virtual showcase

Now, anyone can view a selection of these special digitised heritage items on the totindetail.be website – with the rest of the digitised heritage also being made accessible to the public in stages.

Many heritage items are extremely fragile, which is why the general public only has limited access to them. Digitising these pieces allows us to preserve these invaluable assets in digital form for future generations, ensuring they can be appreciated in their full glory. Anyone can now admire them online, or even digitally hold them to examine them closely without any risk of damaging them.

– Nico Verplancke, Director of meemoo

Flemish Minister Jan Jambon attended in person to launch the totindetail.be website.

The GIVE project is putting Flanders on the map in terms of heritage digitisation. We’re using both tried-and-tested and innovative techniques – such as artificial intelligence and 3D digitisation – to ensure our valuable heritage is preserved in a sustainable, digital way, so it’s available for anyone to view whenever they like. At the same time, we’re also opening doors for future generations to delve into Flanders’ rich history. Our heritage is not just our past, but a crucial part of our identity and culture that needs to be cherished.

– Jan Jambon, Flemish Minister for Culture

First World War diary of author Virginie Loveling

One of the most striking stories is found in the war diary and heritage masterpiece of renowned author Virginie Loveling, preserved in the Ghent University Library Boekentoren (‘Book Tower’). She uses poignant words to describe life during World War I in and around Ghent.

Some cuttings, excerpts and other notes from Loveling’s war diary, Ghent University Library, public domain.

Loveling kept this diary for four years – at quite some risk to her own life. It’s a moving testimony of daily life (and survival) during a time of occupation and war, and – at the same time – a denunciation of the madness of war for future generations. It is not only a rich part of Flemish history; it remains highly relevant today. And its digitisation by meemoo means anyone will soon be able to read the original diary in its entirety.

Innovative techniques

The digitisation process varies depending on the medium being digitised. Glass plates, for example, are placed on a lightbox and photographed in high resolution (see video below). Meemoo has also pioneered innovative techniques in this project to digitise heritage even better and more sustainably than ever before. Centuries-old masterpieces have been scanned in 3D – a practice that is still very rare in the Flemish heritage sector.

Meemoo has not only digitised new material, but also made 170,000 hours of audiovisual content from archives more searchable. We have used artificial intelligence to enrich these clips with descriptive data (metadata). This is an incredibly time-consuming task when done manually – it would take almost 20 years just to view everything we have digitised! But using facial and speech recognition techniques has allowed us to identify details such as people’s names, locations and transcriptions.

Copyright GMS

175 partners

This project succeeded thanks to active collaboration with no fewer than 175 partners from the cultural, media and government sectors.

Digitising heritage is crucial, but it usually comes with high costs and many challenges that institutions struggle to tackle on their own. Meemoo is an essential partner for helping the heritage sector to face these challenges in line with international quality standards. The GIVE project has allowed us to further document heritage and make it available online to researchers, students, artists, enthusiasts – anyone! And this, in turn, results in us gaining more knowledge about our important and inspiring heritage, while also increasing its international visibility.

– Anne van Oosterwijk, Director of Musea Brugge – Collectie

The GIVE project is part of the Flemish Government’s Resilience Recovery Plan and was made possible with support from the European Fund for Regional Development (ERDF). The GIVE project also won a Flanders Digital Award this year for the most sustainable project.