Getting to the Web

Abstract

This article discusses the long chain of operations involved behind the scenes before,  and  after,  cultural  heritage  collections  make  an  appearance  on  the World Wide Web, focusing particularly on Web access and digital preservation.
Many institutions are in the process of making the transition from “project-based” to “program-based” digitization, and are attempting to knit together and implement a fully integrated and coherent digitization strategy. Because digital technology has an inherent tendency to break down time-honored barriers and niches, this transition can be difficult. A digitization program is likely to have an impact in many traditional arenas: acquisition; collections conservation and cataloguing;  description  and  access;  distribution  and  exhibition;  and  intellectual property or digital rights management, in addition to requiring attention to digital  capture  itself  and  the  management  and  preservation  of  digital  objects.
Digitization programs may therefore require greater consensus and cooperation across an institution, or between institutions, to be successful than was true of limited  digital  projects  undertaken  by  one  department  or  another.  Even  after
the long upstream journey to a live Web site has been made, the accessibility of collections is a complicated issue with no single solution. A combination of traditional cataloguing; new data standards and protocols; social tagging; full-text
availability; thesauri and ontologies; and perhaps eventually some forms of automated visual and or aural indexing may all be required to navigate intelligently through an increasingly massive complex of heterogeneous material.