The digitisation strategy describes the planning and implementation of the digitisation of scientific collections and research data in order to create a digital catalogue of holdings. This is part of the virtual collection and research environment at the LIB.
The digitisation strategy is aimed at long-term and sustainable procedures and methods for the creation and handling of digitised data. It defines the objectives, describes the infrastructures, specifies the necessary resources and defines responsibilities. The strategy paper is dynamic and will be adapted and further developed as the digitisation process progresses.
What is collection digitisation?
Labels, pictures, entry books
Digitisation refers to the recording of information about individual collection objects, collection samples or a collection. Digitisation in the context of scientific collections is the process and computer-aided availability of object-related data (labels, images, entry books) from the collections and collection-based research via the digital inventory catalogue (collection management and digital asset management systems).
In addition, their virtual compositions with additional documents and media represent the virtual collections. Digitisation is not only the transformation of information about the objects into bytes, but also includes the physical processing and improvement of the collection as well as collection-based research based on digital data. It therefore has an impact on access and the daily handling of the collections.
Benefits of digitalisation
Facilitate access
Digitisation facilitates access to the collections and their objects. Future generations of researchers can build on previous results in the long term: digital representations of the objects and related information such as media or publications exist.
Digital representations allow insight into the details and history of the collection objects without having to have the object physically available. The daily curatorial handling of collection objects is made easier, including legally relevant documentation(ABS/Nagoya), loans, reporting and more.
The digital catalogue will be made available to the public together with the research results in order to make the collections and collection-based research at the LIB visible to other researchers, the interested public and political decision-makers. The development of virtual collections under various aspects is possible.
Future generations can build on previous results.
All data on the collection objects, with the exception of multimedia data, is stored in the "Diversity Collection" module of the "Diversity Workbench" collection management system. Projects are created for the individual collections for this purpose. Access and publication of the entries are controlled via the projects.
Future generations of researchers can build on previous results in the long term: there are digital representations of the objects and related information, such as media or publications. Digital representations allow insight into the details and history of the collection objects without having to have the object physically available.
The digital catalogue together with the research results are made available to the public in order to make the collections and collection-based research at the LIB visible to other researchers, the interested public and political decision-makers. The development of virtual collections under various aspects is possible.
Legal matters
Licences: All collection-related data is published under the Creative Commons licence CC BY SA licence. The metadata of datasets are published under the cc0 licence. Special licences apply for media.
Monitoring/reporting
The number of entries in the collection database is determined on a monthly basis and can be viewed at https://collections.zfmk.de/statistics.
Access to the data
The Collection Management Framework Diversity Workbench is used to collect data and manage digital collection information. This requires the installation of the DiversityWorkbench client and a login for the database. There is an internal and an external access point to the database.
The data of the digital collection is published in the LIB Digital Collection Catalogue and can be searched via the Internet. It is the public portal for the LIB collection data.
There is also an interface for machine-controlled queries of the collection data http://id.zfmk.de/collection_ZFMK/.
Collection data for GBIF, GFBio and Europeana are made available via the BioCASe provider software at the LIB.