The Archive on Top of Your Desk: An Introduction to Self-Documenting Image Files [1993]

Abstract

Recent technical developments made it realistic that individual historians could have work stations on their desks, which would allow them access to multi-GB collections of archival documents in digitized form. The problem with such a collection is, that the information systems of different archives usually handle their archival material in such a way, that it becomes very hard to extract content from one of them and integrate them into a local information system optimized to support the research interests of a specific user. An architecture for information system is described, which maximizes the possibility to transfer documents between different such systems. This architecture is based upon the concept of digital objects representing individual documents which contain all the semantic information necessary to integrate them seamlessly into different information systems.