An Overview of and Innovative Perspectives for the Serbia-Forum Cultural Heritage Digitization Project

Abstract

The initiation of the Serbia-Forum project, geared towards the digitization, presentation and organization of articles of Serbian cultural heritage and historic significance began successfully in March 2012. Strides made to collect as many significant digitized articles proved to be successful. Digitization of significant media content using state of the art scanners has been performed and is in constant progress. The Serbia-Forum is structured according to the Austria-Forum model. The structure is exhibited via the presentation of digitized content on the web. The Mathematical Institute of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences or MISANU, the instigator of the Serbia-Forum project, in cooperation with many partner institutions both in and out of the Serbian government has enriched its collection of digitized content with 80,000 new units. Currently, the content ranges from postcards, newspapers, photographs and books to other relevant media. Progress has been made in content organization and searching through the content structure. Metadata enrichment and dynamic or interactive and user defined metadata development methods for richer content description are under development. The enriched metadata will aid in the semantic search capabilities or services that the Serbia-Forum is to provide to its users. This will enable easy, fast, flexible and user friendly content searching experience. Developments in this direction are planned for 2014.