How Bits and Bytes Widen Cultural Heritage Boundaries

Abstract

Cultural heritage, tangible and intangible, natural or cultural, movable or immovable, is a valuable inherit from the past, and a basic need for contemporary society. Lined up with the 2005 Faro Convention and the United Nations Organization 2030 Agenda, governments and institutions that work in the cultural heritage sector, supported by international and national public policies and programs, have engaged ways for cultural access and heritage preservation. Memory institutions (like Libraries, Archives and Museums) benefited from the digital environment by engaging massive collections digitization both for access and preservation of cultural heritage. At the same time, they started to question about their differences and resemblances and to be more concerned with information (content) instead of the physical support. Thus, Information Science represents a changing in professional attitudes, and academic curricula, and leading to convergence and collaboration. The aim of this paper is to underline the paradigm shift that the digital environment brought to cultural institutions and how cultural heritage is converging and collaborating in the World Wide Web. In conclusion, the digital world, where bits and bytes are all equal, have broken cultural heritage boundaries.

Keywords

• Memory institutions
• Digital Heritage
• Information Science