Publications

This document pertains to the selection of the Flemish Heritage Database, a new centrally administered collection management system with accompanying services. We initiated this tender in 2023.

At meemoo, we believe that content is more valuable when it’s shared, and more and more Flemish organisations and institutions are also recognising the importance of open sharing. But what about the various ethical issues that this brings with it? As a service organisation, we’re providing the necessary support, and we’re not alone – developing sustainable solutions together with an (inter)national network. In recent months, for example, meemoo has been actively involved in the Creative Commons Ethics of Open Sharing working group.This has resulted in a card game that is designed to initiate conversations about ethics within your organisation and sharpen up your critical thinking skills – all in an accessible way. 

Even though museums and heritage organisations are currently working hard to digitise their analogue collections, creating digital 3D models of collection items still remains a relatively unexplored area. Fortunately, the GIVE Flemish masterpieces project has given us an opportunity to digitise a large number of sculptures, which are recognised as masterpieces, in 3D. In this tech blog, we look in more detail at a potential working method and practical step-by-step plan – based on our specific experience from this initial project – in which practical feasibility, sustainable archiving and the widest possible (re)usability of the digital copies are paramount.

Public domain collections can be accessed online, making them the ideal place to get started with your open data policy. Every year since 2018, Public Domain Day has been offering the heritage sector a platform to share their achievements, challenges and visions for providing access to collections that are no longer protected by copyright. This year on 15 February, we organised an event together with the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), Wikimedia Belgium and Ghent University Library.

This procedure relates to the software solution and additional services for a metadata infrastructure. We launched this competition procedure with negotiation in May 2022 and awarded the project to Triply B.V., a Dutch company that specialises in linked data and knowledge graphs.

In May 2022, we held an anniversary edition of the Open Cultural Data Bootcamp. For the fifth time in a row, we welcomed a whole host of cultural heritage sector partners – but in person again this time – for five packed days. They returned home afterwards full of new knowledge about open cultural data and how to apply it within their own organisation and sector.

In this report, we look back at SIRDUKE, the project in which damaged lacquer disks were optically digitised, to save the audio recordings. For this project, which ran from November 2020 to October 2021, we worked together with Gecko, VRT and INA.

Lots of collections currently have hardly any descriptive metadata, which limits the findability and searchability of their content and prevents them from being reused. Adding metadata manually is also very time-consuming task, which is why we’ve set up two projects to investigate what possibilities artificial intelligence can offer for automatic metadata creation. This technology needs to be treated with caution, however. In this tech blog, we take a close look at the legal and ethical challenges.

The first phase of SCALA, the pilot project on sustainable storage for digital private law archives, is complete. To conclude the project and create a starting point for the next phase, the AIDA network (the nine institutions behind SCALA) organised a focus day on 26 April to share ideas about archiving and preserving born-digital archives and collections. Here is the report.

In this report we look back at the digitisation of quarter-inch audio tapes. The digitisation ran until July 2019 and was part of meemoo's first digitisation project.

At first glance, there is a strict distinction between carriers of analogue and digital audiovisual information. In practice, however, this distinction is not always clear. The word ‘digitisation’ doesn’t always cover the load and is therefore not always used correctly. In this tech blog, we will clarify the terminology by diving into history.

Public domain collections are collections that can be accessed online without any issues, which makes them ideal for starting to implement your open data policy. Every year, Public Domain Day offers organisations in the heritage sector a platform where they can share their achievements, challenges and visions for providing access to collections which are no longer protected by copyright. We organised a webinar around these issues on 10 February – together with KBR (Royal Library of Belgium), Wikimedia Belgium, Ghent University Library and Collections of Ghent.

In 2019, meemoo launched the Digital Maturity Self-Assessment Tool, requested by the Flemish Department of Culture, Youth and Media. This online tool helps organisations from the broader cultural field assess how digitally mature they are. Now, three years later, we’ve conducted an extensive analysis based on the answers from organisations that completed the Self-Assessment Tool non-anonymously.