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Software solution for digital archives

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2022

Abstract

With the expansion of computer technology in all areas including culture, there is a growing need for the digitization of resources. Therefore, the creation of digital archives is necessary to store this information in a well-structured data form. Such data can be of different natures: articles, chronicles and books, image and audio documents, and various physical objects. Digitization of this data is done by the manual creation of metadata sets accurately describing these objects, which are then stored in a specialized digital repository. The collected and uniformly stored metadata can thus be easily published and important information describing the original data can be easily found in them. There is a large number of systems that are concerned with these issues, but they often have some shortcomings; among the biggest of them are their technological inefficiency and non-user-friendly working environment.

This study describes the creation of a demo version (or prototype) of the software and related specialized databases within the NAKI II Source Krkonoše project. We tried to create a comprehensive digital archive solution for the collection, centralization and accessibility of metadata records describing data about the history of Krkonoše to the general public. The proposed solution consists of a specialized database for data storage and a user interface accessible via a web application, which allows users to work with the basic data - creation and editing of metadata labels, collected data and their re-viewing based on the most modern technologies, which bring new approaches and possibilities among existing systems and thus extend and surpass them in certain areas such as speed, readability and size of records. . Therefore, other paths were chosen for further development and due to the use of other technologies, the programming team was changed. Further software development then proceeded on the basis of feedback from the testing of the described demo version of the software. The proposed database structure was restructured for implementation reasons and mainly affected the database used. An existing solution in the form of the open-source library system KOHA was used as the basis for data storage. However, this study of a possible solution shows the way for creating a complex solution for digital archives and its usability for diverse data was demonstrated by the study.