New publication: “A Handbook of Culture Portals – Online Cultural and Scientific Offerings”

The “Handbook of Culture Portals – Online Cultural and Scientific Offerings” was published in October 2015. The handbook consists of four parts: “Introduction and Importance of Culture Portals”, “Legal and Commercial Aspects or Aspects of Utilisation”, as well as “Trans-regional Portals” and “Regional Portals”, and shows the current trends and perspectives of portals in the areas of culture and science, such as e.g. those of the German Digital Library. The focus is on the presentation of diversity in culture portals. Different projects are presented based on historical, professional, organisational, legal and commercial issues.

The handbook is edited by Ellen Euler, Deputy Manager of Finances, Law and Communication at the German Digital Library, Monika Hagedorn-Saupe, Assistant Director of the Institute for Museum Research, Gerald Maier, Deputy President of the State Archives of Baden-Wuerttemberg, and Werner Schweibenz, Research Assistant at the Library Service Centre Baden-Wuerttemberg. All of the editors belong to institutions that are members of the German Digital Library’s competence network and are directly involved in its development.

The articles follow a guideline which enables a comparative study of the offerings, and this gives an overview of the current portal landscape.

The guideline includes the following:

• Contents: thematic orientation, current holdings, planned development of holdings, metadata with and without digital copies
• Collection policy, rights – respectively licence models for the contents
• Organisation, legal structure, sponsorship and financing, political aspects
• Plans for content-related and technical development, planned expansion phases
• Technology (generally understandable overview)
• Utilisation of standard data, semantic web functionality
• Conditions and requirements for participation

Up to now there was no standard reference work on culture portals on the internet. Due to specialist publications being split up among the specialised bodies of the individual sectors, it was previously very time-consuming to obtain an overview of the fundamentals, the status and the perspectives.

Individual articles of this publication were published under Licence CC BY-SA 4.0 International, so that these articles can be used free of charge. In the next weeks, therefore, - as already in the Publication “A Future for the Past – Cultural Heritage in a Digital World”) – the CC-licenced articles of the Handbook of Culture Portals will be made available by us for reading and downloading.

The “Handbook of Culture Portals” is published by De Gruyter Verlag and available as e-book or print edition for EUR 149.95.

To order from the publishing company