Effective publishing of digitalized cultural heritage on the web

Snežana Popović ; Nina Krstić ; Zoran Cvetković

Review of the National Center for Digitization, Tome 30 (2017) no. 1.

Résumé

The process of digitization of cultural property has multiple targets, defined by the strategy of cultural institutions. First, digitization contributes to the protection of cultural properties by obtaining all related data and their representative archive images. Besides, images of digitalized properties have a significant role in the online presentation and promotion of cultural artefacts. This paper presents our research and cognition about prerequisites and promising ways of successful presentation and promotion of digitized cultural artefacts on the Web. The fact is that today's Web is an immeasurable repository of data and images. Thus, it is difficult to achieve satisfactory promotional results, if images of cultural artefacts are not described on the Web. In addition, the benefits of available technologies and vocabularies, applicable for effective semantic annotation of images were studied. We concluded that the use of Schema.org and Getty vocabulary, followed by JSON-LD serialization, contributed to more accurate description and categorization of cultural property images. We applied and checked the conclusions of our research within the project "Marginal Art in Serbia". The project examines professional interpretation and Web promotion of marginal artists' artworks from the collection of Museum of Naive and Marginal Art (MNMA), Jagodina. The review of the Project's final results confirms that Google recognized our semantically annotated images as structured data, classifying them into the related categories and assigning them high ranking in its indexes.