LI-MA and SBHK Host Second Data Workshop on Digital Art Accessibility

Join museum and heritage colleagues in Amersfoort on 18 September

18 September 2026 10:00 - 15:00

Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, Amersfoort

Are you interested in making digital art collections more discoverable, shareable and sustainably accessible? Would you like to explore the tools, standards and strategies that can make a difference for your organisation? Then join the Digital Art Data Workshop. Together with colleagues from museums and heritage organisations, we will explore practical solutions, exchange experiences and lay the groundwork for the sustainable accessibility of digital art collections.

Museums and heritage organisations across the Netherlands are actively working to make their collections digitally accessible. Finding the right descriptions, using appropriate terminology and ensuring that collection material can be discovered by the public all require careful consideration. But how do we approach this for digital art, a field for which metadata standards and descriptive models are still only emerging?

To address this challenge, a dedicated Digital Art Data Workshop has been established. The Foundation for the Preservation of Contemporary Art (SBHK). and LI-MA – Living Media Art, the Dutch centre of expertise for media and digital art, are collaborating to improve the discoverability, interoperability and long-term accessibility of digital art.

Joost Dofferhoff is the workshop's permanent point of contact. As a Registrar & Assistant Conservator and Documentalist at LI-MA, he combines extensive collection expertise with his work as a data specialist. We warmly invite you to join the conversation and explore together how we can make digital art collections more future-proof.

The Digital Art Data Workshop is a relatively new initiative and is still not widely known among the museums and organisations within the LI-MA and SBHK networks. With this workshop, we hope to change that. The session will be held in Dutch and is aimed at museum and heritage professionals. During the workshop, we will focus on improving access to your collection through Linked Open Data, domain-specific terminology and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). Together we will explore how these concepts fit within existing collection management systems and what developments or adaptations may be needed to support their implementation.

The workshop is also intended as a forum for knowledge exchange. Together, we will map which museums and organisations have already taken steps in this area and which are still at an early stage. Rather than simply presenting our own work, we want to hear from museums and collection holders about the challenges they face and the questions they have. We will therefore discuss what museums and heritage organisations expect from LI-MA as a digital art data workshop, as well as their needs regarding Linked Open Data, terminology, Persistent Identifiers, and data cleaning.

Finally, we will introduce existing tools and infrastructures developed by the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed – NDE), together with other data workshops that have been active across the Netherlands for several years.

We look forward to an engaging and interactive day centred on knowledge sharing, collaboration and the future of digital art collections.