Networking historical sources: a demand-side driven approach
Andrea Rosenbusch , Swiss Federal Archives, Switzerland

Short Paper: Short Paper 4: Building a New Culture

The Swiss Federal Archives is undertaking a project to create new spaces on the World Wide Web to make cultural heritage more accessible. We would like to depart from central entry points and build a network with several knots. Individual applications or smaller networks can cater better to the needs of their users and offer more sophisticated search facilities than a single gateway. A network is much more flexible than a common database, faster to be put into effect and to be changed, and less costly - which may assure that small institutions can participate and the service remains free of charge to the end-user. On the user side, cooperation with interest groups and more research into the behaviour and needs of our users are the main focus of our project. Apart from identifying and providing adequate entry points, much effort will be put into designing user interfaces which encourage playful learning. On the supply side, the minimum requirements for the participating institutions are that they make their resources available in a way that supports multiple entry points and that they agree on a simple common set of metadata. The outcome expected is that better accessibility will enormously increase access, giving institutions a higher degree of popularity and better reasoning for funding.

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