Paper short abstract:

During the present era of the digital network society there is a need for a www-infrastructure that would provide a platform for digital collections of cultural heritage. Based on repositories, distributed in different countries, the idea of linked cultural heritage could be put forward in a new way.

Paper long abstract:

The services of tradition archives are rapidly changing. Access services are developed for users, and created by users, such as crowd-sourcing methods, interactive portals, folksonomies, tagging, participatory cataloguing, among many other solutions. Information resources are retrievable due to the digital services, not only by using the traditional indexes in archives. Virtual use is not restricted in time and place. By using digitized archival reserves and search portals, the users are not anymore solely bound to the archival institute. However, huge amount of documents are still stored in analog form and used with the help of manual finding aids.

During the present era of the digital network society there is a need for a functional www-infrastructure that would provide a platform for digital collections of cultural heritage with an ergonomic user-interface allowing searches within a particular tradition, and across the traditions of multiple cultures according to a diverse range of criteria. Based on repositories, distributed possibly in different countries, the idea of linked cultural heritage could be put forward in a new way, for creating unfinished stories in the circulation network of the traditions. This requires active participation of tradition archives in the development of the archival world.

Furthermore, integration of the archives, museums and libraries in developing search portals and solutions of Linked Open Data are bringing the cultural organizations in closer cooperation. In the digital world the keywords for the cooperation of the 'collecting institutions' are network, context, interoperability and integration.