The Pursuit of a Vision: From Digital Storage to Semantic Archive

  • Marin Laak, Estonian Cultural History Archives, Estonian Literary Museum, Estonia
  • Preservation of the digital cultural heritage is one of the main tasks of memory institutions. Archives all over the world have created numerous databases bringing older cultural property back to active use to retain the continuity of the cultural memory. That brings focus to the research of reception and usage of cultural heritage. In previous years more attention has been given to studying user groups of different age, so-called digital natives and digital immigrants.
    Younger generation is acting fundamentally different in consuming the new digital media. In addressing the younger generation the speed, accessibility and usage possibilities including web2.0 ideology are significant. Context and new knowledge are added to the digital records databases to create the contetnt for media consumption of the youth and enrich the presentation of archival materials. Different records (audio, video, image, written text) can be linked so that new knowledge models are formed. In the knowledge models the different types of materials are linked with semantic connections. By joining semantically connected audiovisual materials new type of cultural entities – the semantic threads are formed.
    The first part of the paper will concentrate on the younger users according to the international studies, adding new data from the survey of the Estonian youth.
    The second part of the paper discusses the possibilities of creating a new type of archive by creating the semantic ontology of cultural heritage. The examples are the semantic threads uniting audiovisual material from different archives about the Estonian national epic Kalevipoeg.