From MAMA to Europeana. Possible strategies for museum digitisation

Abstract

The various types of public collections apply a variety of approaches to digitisation. As regards museums, the period 1996-1997 may be considered as the initial phase of efforts: no real strategies were drawn up, just the minimum conditions were created and a very important learning process started in the profession. The MAMA (Database of Hungarian Museums) project was aimed at establishing a meta-database consisting of the collections of major Hungarian museums, at creating a basic data structure to make the information held in the database available and easily searchable for all those interested. The MAMA project has been implemented, but its real operation did not start. The formulation of the first unified and real strategic plan of digitisation for the museum field started in 2003, based on the findings of a survey of digitisation tasks, covering most fields of culture. In 2008 among the main duties of the Hungarian National Museum the following priority appeared: „ nationwide methodological and co-ordination activity related to digitising cultural goods preserved in museums”. In 2009, with support from the Ministry of Education and Culture, a Museum Digitisation Committee was established. The joint committee, consisting of nine members, accepted a short activity plan with clear goals and works on its implementation. The plan includes e.g. the listing of themes for digitisation to be elaborated for various cultural grant schemes, which also serves as recommendation for those bodies inviting proposals, in harmony with a unified priority system for museums. It is an important goal of the committee to organise and establish various professional forums (webpage, professional advocacy groups, training, courses), and also to collect existing content for further use, under the leadership of a national aggregator organisation. The Museum Digitisation Committee provides an adequate organisational framework to harmonise digitisation works carried out at public collections. At the same time, it promotes professional consensus as a key to the solution of the most significant problems arising. In the series “Scrutiny of Hungarian databases” independent experts evaluate various Hungarian online content services from the point of vies of their use by libraries.