Going Digital – The Israeli Museums View

from our Israel correspondent and project manager Ram Shimony
Share

On 15th March, 2012 Israel launched its 5 years national project of digitizing the museums’ collections.

Oded Breida, manager of Museum Beit-Terezein

The event took place at Museum Beit-Hatfutsot, with more than 150 participants: Managers and museums’ professionals.

Oded Breida, manager of Museum Beit-Terezein

The vision of “going Digital” was described by the project steering members: Shimon Elkabetz – Head of The Culture Governance, Reuven Pinsky – Head of Moreshet Project at The Prime Minister Office and Idit Amichai – Head of The Department for Museums and Plastic Art.

Ram Shimony – the project manager elaborated on the concepts of the challenging project and explained the milestones around which Israel and the project will base their Digital Heritage road map:

  1. MANA is the basic collections management system which functions as safe where each museum catalogue its collections and objects and every one stores its photos and any other relevant documentation, in order to manage them and in order to preserve them for long period: The systems serves the museums the government provides the technical services: storage, redundancy, help-desk etc. Currently MANA serves 36 museums, 200,000 objects and expected to grow continuously until all museums will manage all objects with it.
  2. Three types of export templates will be developed in MANA to enable the upload of collections, objects and exhibitions to the following web sites:
    1. Europeans – according to LIDO standard. Based on linked IMJ vocabularies, where available.
    2. iMUS – the Israeli museums’ portal, with respect to the curators demands: virtual exhibitions, collections and objects. Standards are varied, as museums are free to adopt their own cataloguing approach and standards.
    3. Museum’s web site, if available.
    4. iMUS will serve as Europeana back site.
      1. iMUS search engine will include IMJ vocabularies in Hebrew and English.
      2. iMUS will integrate Europeana API, enabling bi-directions streaming data.
      3. Public engagement aspects will be considered, managed and modified according to the changing environment, technology and museum’s management vision.
      4. Last but not least – iMUS will be linked to the Israeli national digital heritage library, using through vocabularies and other semantic web techniques.

The attached PDF slides were presented during the event.

Leave a Reply

Related Articles

Europeana, new look
The new homepage now includes a stronger focus on the content, with a bigger image slideshow, a featured partner section and a great carousel highlighting the latest pins on Pinterest. The search is easier thanks to new automatic suggestions that pop up when the users are typing the words they’re searching for.
Europeana Photography review meeting: eye inside
On March 5th 2013, the Central University Library in Leuven hosted the first review meeting of EuropeanaPhotography project. Digitalmeetsculture.net editor, Valentina Bachi, was present to the whole event with both the roles of speaker and of correspondent. Next appointment for the EuropeanaPhotography project is the plenary meeting in Athens on 13-14-15 March 2013
Poland's presence in Europeana is growing
The Polish Collections in Europeana conference was organized in the medieval city of Toruń on October 18-19, 2012 by the International Centre for Information Management Systems and Services ICIMSS. A number of Europeana-related projects were presented, including EuropeanaPhotography, Judaica Europeana and others.
Museum of History of Photography in Krakow MHF
The museum runs a number of departments and holds a variety of different events. The main scope of the museum’s activities at present is exhibitions, education and digitization. In each of these fields we are planning and implementing actions in accordance with the MHF mission which emphasizes improving the availability of its collection through a variety of media.