Realising exposition on the internet – very easy thanks to „digital-extra“

Werner Matt, Archivist of the city of Dornbirn (AU) – Doing expositions on the internet

Also smaller archives think more and more about doing a part of their public relations on the internet. More traditional forms of expositions consume a lot of resources and are often only for a limited time visible. Moreover have many of the smaller institutions also hidden treasures in their funds that they liked to present to a bigger public. Who would have guessed for instance, that the archive of Dornbirn possesses city plans of from the Roman times?!

The project „digital-extra“ from the EU, www.digital-extra.eu aims to sort out that problem. It wants to create a kind of a toolkit to help creating smaller, good looking online exposition projects with simple methods. During the current development stage there are 8 partners (of very different kind, everything from archives to school teachers) from 6 nations involved. This evaluation phase will be over by fall 2010.

The whole project is intended to be a guideline that consists of evaluated components. In addition the EU will be offering a formation free of charge within its Leonarda da Vinci programme. With that everybody can aquire a solid base to start his own online exposition.

The (extendible) modules of the formation have the following content:

• Why expositons on the internet? Main reason is to give access to special or unique objects
• What are the possibilities, what the limits of such an exposition? An exposition surely not to confound with giving online access to a whole fund
• Who do we compose descriptions for this medium. Should one translate them?
• Content, drafts and scenarios for such expositions
• Online expositions and its procurement (e-learning)
• Media, treating of  the media and introduction to CMS and simple graphic tools. The project has here the intention of using software under the Creative Commons licence.

Mr. Matt was kind enough to answer the FR some questions after his presentation.

FR: We talked a lot about competences for archivists these days. What are the key competences for a Young Professional in your opinion?

W. Matt: First of all curiosity. Everybody brings his own specific bundle of experience and interest with him. Especially archives of smaller communities offer multifaceted operational areas. You can never cover really every aspect, but it‘s still your mission. We ask therefore for people who know themselves very well. One should know of his strong points (may be IT, social competences,…) and who he can use them for the good of archive.

Communal archives offer a wide range of activities so e.g. the classical archival work, contact with the public or also negotiations with the administration. Young archivists are often very promising contact persons for administrations because they have grown as „digital natives“ and therefore supposed to know how to use this technology for the good of the institution.

FR: Is electronic archiving already an issue for a institution on the level of a small town?

I happen to be the advisor for electronic record keeping in my region. It is important on my level, that smaller towns come together to find common solutions for their already urgent problems with digital archiving. Legal certainty is also for us a key issue.

I can give you an example for this from my town. We are happy to have our own small media archive. Only with this we could assure the save storage of metadata. The system allows us to work with the optimal file formats and it can automatically search for duplicates. A control of the growing stack of media is more and more important. Every department in my city is using digital cameras and they produce very quickly a lot of material. In collaboration with a media archive we can at least impose a minimal standard of description.