Prints

Our Open Print Collections store digital files—born digital flyers, documents, publications (not published as a book or journal article), and digital surrogates of analogue prints, graphic posters, engravings and lithographs, ex librises and graphics for special occasions, loose-leaf albums, picture postcards, text posters and leaflets, obituaries; catalogue them to a high standard, and connect them to locations, buildings, people and other things via linked open data (semantic web) techniques. Whenever possible, we aim to make a preview (low resolution) or a high-resolution digital copy available.

FAIR collections: from yet another scanned file to a web resource

The idea of Open Print Collections is making a step forward from treating a digitised copy of a small print as a series of still images (scanned as an image) or as an OCR-text. We help you make the digital cultural object and your catalogue new web resources that can be put on timelines and connected to other images, texts, persons, and modern and historical addresses. You no longer read it as strings but as a thing; your scanned small print, in this case, a pricelist, becomes from a digital still image or text a digital price list.

In more technical terms, this is our application of the FAIR principle of open science. We make this price list, and it is individual items more findable and more accessible. We facilitate interoperability between OpenStreetMaps, photographer encyclopedias, camera collections, and commercial history exhibitions. Eventually, this leads to a much higher reuse potential: a simple PDF document became a web resource that can be found by many curators or collectors, and it can be linked to various map applications, other open collections, or linked open data resources.

Using the semantic web or linked open data technology is nothing new in the cultural heritage sector: information scientists (formerly known as library scientists) in large national libraries and national archives are the avant-garde users of this new layer of the world wide web.

Examples:

• You may want to synchronize your contents to archive.org and/or Wikimedia.
• You collect material about an artist. You would like the data to be correct on all pages of Wikipedia, and your photos be present in Europeana and Flickr Commons.
• Your items should have an inventory book and catalogue that matches the ISAD(G) standard, the locational data is connected and searchable on Google Maps and Open Street Map.

Open Linked Collections Offering

The mission of Open Collections Network is to find suitable web-based solutions (such as the digital storage and collections management service of archive.org, or the digital heritage aggregation and search engine of Europeana) that can be used by small public and private collections that do not have an IT department (or not even an IT-specialist) at their disposal.

We want to ensure that these services—with self-developed but open-source plugins and connectors when necessary—, are available for even the smallest collections—because we believe that that is where new hidden gems can be found, not in the world’s biggest and most researched collections.

Reprex invites small private collections, small public collections, and open-source developers to its Open Collections Network platform to

• Consolidate a critical mass of small users to remain competitive on large global platforms.

• Curate open-source software that is suitable for the needs of small private and public collections.

• Create new tools and integrations of small or affordable public services for better archiving, digitisation, collection management, rights management, dissemination and publication activities of collections.

• Educate users managing small collections without IT, information or data specialists about making their collection more findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

• Provide service interoperability with linked open data, harmonised and collaborative market/user research, and the best practices of the rights management of commercial, out-of-commerce and public domain cultural objects.