The starting point
Since its foundation in 1948, the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK/IRPA) has documented its study, conservation and restoration of heritage objects in intervention dossiers. These records connect art history, conservation practice and materials science.
The proposal describes an archive of approximately 20,000 dossiers, with around 500 consulted each year. At that time, only about 5% of archival documents were available in digital form. These are the proposal’s historical baseline figures.
Over time, paper records have been joined by scanned documents and digital-born research. Without a consistent strategy for this mixture, information can remain scattered and difficult to preserve, find or reuse.
From HESCIDA to H-SEARCH
HESCIDA established infrastructure for documenting and sharing new and recent digital dossiers. H-SEARCH builds on that foundation, addressing historical records and developing a more complete long-term archival strategy.
Four project objectives
Develop a long-term preservation strategy
Create sustainable procedures and reliable archival packages for digitised and digital-born scientific records.
Make archival knowledge FAIR and open
Adapt existing documentation and dissemination tools to historical dossiers, with appropriate access conditions.
Improve multilingual discovery
Extend search beyond metadata into document content, using OCR and natural language processing.
Reinforce a heritage science knowledge hub
Connect the institute’s expertise and data through BALaT and support participation in wider heritage science infrastructures.
A focused, representative selection
The proposal does not set out to digitise the entire archive within 30 months. It prioritises a selected group of closed dossiers to develop, test and refine workflows that can remain useful after the project.
Selection considers heritage significance, scientific value, research demand, completeness and representation of the institute’s activities. Paintings, polychrome wood sculpture, stone sculpture and textiles are among the areas identified in the proposal.
Paper, digital-born and hybrid records need to be represented so the infrastructure can respond to the different realities of the archive.
Read the selection work package →Preservation and access, designed together
Long-term preservation and online dissemination have overlapping needs, but distinct purposes. The project develops both workflows in parallel and aligns the steps they share.
FAIR means findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Making research data as open as possible also requires careful treatment of personal and sensitive administrative information.
Established standards, reusable workflows and a preference for supported open-source solutions guide the proposed approach. The aim is an infrastructure the institute can continue to operate with available resources.