artifactsand

Artifactsand is a term used in discussions of digital heritage to denote a framework that treats physical artifacts and their digital representations as a coupled pair. Conceived as an intersection of museology, archaeology, and information science, artifactsand emphasizes context, provenance, and interoperability between objects and data records.

Overview: The concept envisions integrated catalogs that link objects with digital surrogates such as 3D scans, high-resolution images, and associated metadata. It promotes standardized metadata to enable cross-institution search, comparative analysis, and long-term preservation.

Origins and development: The term emerged in scholarly discourse in the early 2020s as museums and archives expanded digitization programs. Rather than a single product, artifactsand is described as a conceptual model that guides data governance, modelling decisions, and research workflows.

Key principles: Linked context, provenance traceability, open data, and sustainability. Artifactsand advocates interoperable schemas and controlled vocabularies to connect artifacts with their digital narratives, often drawing on models inspired by CIDOC CRM and related standards.

Impact and use: The framework informs debates about what constitutes an artifact in the digital age and how digital surrogates relate to material objects. In practice, projects inspired by artifactsand aim to align collection data with research data management, digital preservation, and scholarly reuse.

Challenges and criticism: Critics note that strong governance is required to prevent drift in links between objects and records, and to maintain data quality, licensing clarity, and version control.

See also: digital humanities, museum informatics, artifact, provenance, CIDOC CRM, metadata standards.