Are you interested in how digital art collections can become more discoverable, shareable, and sustainably accessible? Would you like to explore which tools, standards and strategies can make a real difference for your organisation? Then sign up for the Data Workshop for Digital Art. Together with colleagues from museums and heritage institutions, we will explore practical solutions, share experiences and lay the groundwork for sustainable access to digital art in the future.

The Importance of Accessibility

Across the Netherlands, institutions are working to make collections digitally accessible. Yet digital art poses specific challenges. Finding the right descriptions, appropriate terminology and suitable platforms to make materials discoverable for audiences requires careful consideration. But how do we approach this in the case of digital art – an art form for which metadata standards and descriptive models are still largely underdeveloped? 

To address this, a dedicated data workshop for digital art has now been established. The Foundation for the Conservation of Contemporary Art (SBHK) and LI-MA, the expertise centre for media and digital art, are collaborating with the shared aim of making digital art more discoverable, shareable and sustainably accessible. 

About the Workshop

The Digital Art Data Workshop is a relatively new initiative and is currently still underrepresented among museums and organisations connected to the LI-MA and SBHK networks. With this meeting, we aim to change that together. The session will be held in Dutch and is aimed at museum and heritage professionals. 

During the workshop, the focus will be on improving access to your collection through Linked Open Data, domain-specific terminology and Persistent Identifiers. We will explore how these concepts relate to existing systems and which adjustments or developments may be needed to better support them.

The meeting will also serve explicitly as a moment for knowledge exchange. Together, we will map which museums and organisations have already taken steps in this area and which are still at an early stage. As a data workshop, we do not only wish to present our perspective, but also to hear directly from institutions and collection holders about the challenges they face and the questions they have. We will therefore discuss expectations of LI-MA as a digital data workshop, as well as needs relating to Linked Open Data, terminology, persistent identifiers and data cleaning.

Finally, attention will be given to existing tools and infrastructures developed by the Netherlands Digital Heritage Network (NDE), in collaboration with other data workshops that have been active elsewhere in the country for some time.

We look forward to an engaging and interactive meeting centred on knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Joost Dofferhoff is the main point of contact for the data workshop. In his role as registrar, assistant curator, and documentalist, he brings expertise that aligns closely with his work as a data specialist. We warmly invite you to join the conversation and explore together how digital art can be made sustainably accessible for the future.

Interested? Register via aanmelden@sbhk.nl.