Dutch national initiative for quality assessment of digital heritage projects 
Marco de Niet, Digitaal Erfgoed Nederland | Digital Heritage Netherlands, The Netherlands
Commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Cultural Affairs and Science, the foundation Digital Heritage Netherlands (DEN) operates a quality system, which is used for dissemination and assessment of ICT expertise through self-regulation. The quality system is a tool, designed for Dutch cultural heritage institutions, to facilitate the collecting, distribution and evaluation of knowledge about IT policies, IT standards and best practices. This shared knowledge will support the cultural heritage field to build towards a national Dutch Digital Heritage Collection in a professional, future-proof, and public-oriented manner.
During the past years, heritage institutions were particularly focused on making their own collections available in a digital form. Each institution concentrated on its own target groups, used its own methods, and invested a lot of funds along the way. However, a sound digitising policy has a much wider social significance. Digitisation is more than just presenting individual collections. Heritage institutions have a duty in passing on heritage information to the public, to science and to education in the widest sense thinkable. This requires close collaboration and matching ICT strategies. As an independent knowledge platform, DEN supports the heritage institutions to achieve this.
The quality system of DEN consists of a Registry of ICT standards and a Project Bank to promote best practices. Furthermore, DEN supports heritage institutions with creating digitisation policies, investigates how they are implementing ICT into their daily work, and organises various expert meetings and large scale conferences about e-culture and innovation. The DEN quality system is also providing the ICT related criteria for the Dutch governmental grant scheme 'Digitising with a policy' (4m Euro in 2007).
Briefing: Briefings: National Projects [Close-Up]
Keywords: Netherlands, digital heritage projects, quality assessment, IT policy, standardisation
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