The Croatian Cultural Heritage project

The project was initiated by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Croatia, and the project leaders are the National and University Library in Zagreb, the Croatian State Archives and the Museum Documentation Centre pursuant to the Agreement on Cooperation signed in March 2007. It will be implemented over three years.

The objectives of the project include the following:

The digitisation of material leads in the long run to an identifiable and relevant contents and “cultural space” in an electronic environment.

• Services based on such contents are easily accessible to every stakeholder and the selected contents can be accessed on the web in keeping with the rules of their use.
• The produced digital contents are carefully designed and processed in accordance with adopted standards and good practices supporting interoperability.
• The digital collections are rich and can be used in designing educational, tourist and other similar service programmes.
• Digital collections are part of an organised management system offering sufficient guarantee for their long-term preservation and accessibility.
• Institutions with less developed resources will not be denied the possibility to digitise their material.

The creation of rich, widely accessible contents in digital form is one of the basic conditions for the preservation and evaluation of cultural heritage, for the networking and presence of the Croatian cultural heritage in the European and regional cultural contents networks, for the preservation of cultural diversity, and for the use of cultural contents in education, tourism and other services activities.

The Croatian Cultural Heritage portal offers search and access to all types of collections of digitised material in Croatian museums, libraries and archives, whether produced within the scope of this project or only registered and described in it. You can search and examine collections thematically, chronologically, or by type of material, location, area or important personalities, things or events to which they refer.

Institutions and persons engaged in digitisation of material on the portal can find guidelines and instructions for digitisation and similar professional material which can help them in preparing and managing digitisation projects.