Erfgoedinfrastructuur

Erfgoedinfrastructuur is the set of resources and systems that support the preservation, management, and access to cultural heritage assets. It encompasses physical facilities, digital platforms, governance structures, and funding mechanisms that enable museums, archives, libraries, and other heritage institutions to collect, conserve, document, and share heritage materials with the public and researchers.

Physical aspects include climate-controlled storage, conservation laboratories, exhibit spaces, and secure storage for fragile materials. Digital aspects cover digitization workflows, long-term preservation, metadata management, and access platforms.

Standards and interoperability play a central role. Metadata schemes such as Dublin Core and PREMIS, preservation formats and packaging standards including METS, and ontologies like CIDOC CRM support interoperability and exchange. Persistent identifiers and interoperable data models enable discovery and long-term access. Digital asset management systems, institutional repositories, and public portals support access to digitized items and born-digital materials. Initiatives like Europeana illustrate cross-institutional aggregation of heritage records.

Governance and policy encompass copyright and provenance considerations, data protection, access rights, and licensing regimes; funding models; workforce development; and partnerships among public authorities, cultural institutions, universities, and communities.

Access, dissemination, and engagement are core aims. Erfgoedinfrastructuur seeks to balance public access with long-term preservation, promote open data and open licenses where appropriate, and support research, education, and cultural participation through portals, exhibitions, and digital surrogates.

Challenges include securing sustainable funding, reducing backlogs in digitization, ensuring metadata quality, addressing digital obsolescence, and navigating privacy and ethical concerns. Opportunities lie in linked data, AI-assisted metadata enhancement, multilingual access, and community-driven heritage initiatives. The concept is used in policy discussions and professional practice to describe the comprehensive infrastructure needed to safeguard and share cultural heritage.