Preface

‘Opening up our Heritage: Opportunities in Digitising and Promoting Cultural and Research Collections’ is a compelling topic combining the evolving fields of digital technology with the preservation and promotion of cultural heritage. Heritage libraries play a vital role in maintaining our cultural and research collections for future generations. This responsibility often involves a delicate balance. While it is essential to protect these invaluable items, it is equally important to make them accessible and engaging for today’s audiences, whether for education, research, or cultural enrichment.

Thanks to modern digital technologies, we now have powerful tools to bridge this gap. Digitalisation allows us to share and promote our heritage without risking damage to the original artefacts, books, or artworks. In the case of loss due to disasters of any origin, the digital versions of these materials serve as crucial backups. The new technology opens up a world of possibilities for research and education. Text recognition creates huge amounts of searchable text and allows searching for specific terms within a short time. Statistics from late-19th-century journals are now available as data and may be analysed by modern software.

This book explores how these innovative approaches open new opportunities for preserving and presenting our collective history, ensuring that it remains vibrant and accessible for generations to come. The authors are all members of an Erasmus Staff Week exchange organised by the University of Liège Library in 2024. Their papers all demonstrate the significant efforts made in generating, presenting, and disseminating digital content during the last 20 years and may be seen as best practices for digital heritage libraries. Most of the examples offer solutions for the presentation of digital objects, the dissemination of metadata, or the integration of standalone software into broader solutions. Some authors present ideas for the promotion of digitised cultural heritage and for facilitating the creation of carefully selected material packages for educational use.

The published articles may be useful for any institution publishing its cultural heritage online. Reading the outlined best practices and projects, I found a lot of good incentives for planning and conducting the digitisation projects of the German Federal Archives. For the last 5 years, this institution has digitised up to 150 million pages. The yearly increase is now about 30 to 40 million pages. We follow two approaches: Regarding ourselves as a citizen archive, we are offering Digitisation on Demand as a service that allows users to request the digitisation of specific archival materials that have not yet been available online. In general, a maximum of 10 files per subject item is allowed. Therefore, in most cases, no fees will be charged for the reproduction of files that are not subject to legal restrictions concerning protected data. However, fees may be incurred for special requests or individual provisions.

The second approach is the systematic digitalisation of the important records from a specific era. Previous examples are the records of the revolution of 1848–1849, World War I, and the Weimar Republic. In preparation for the centennial of the year 1933, civilian and military documents of the Nazi administration will be made available online.

I hope the publication inspires and informs those involved in the stewardship of cultural and research collections, highlighting the exciting potential of digital transformation in safeguarding our shared heritage. The results of the projects presented here are encouraging and, simultaneously, reveal the need for sustained funding of the work of cultural heritage institutions.