Research and Competence Center Digitalization Berlin (digiS)

Cultural heritage and memory institutions, including research institutes, are nowadays expected to administer, preserve and maintain digital cultural assets, as well as make them available to the public on a permanent basis. This poses enormous challenges for these institutions, as particularly small and medium-sized institutions have little or no experience in this respect. digiS maintains a network for individual projects involved in the funding programme and provides consulting services to aid in digitalisation, with the goal of enabling institutions to play an active role in their digital practice. In this sense, the digitalisation lifecycle is conceived as an extensive process beginning with data management and rule-based enrichment, progressing to data preparation and digitisation, concluding with the online presentation and ensuring the long-term availability of the digital assets.

With the establishment of digiS in 2012, the state of Berlin has pioneered the state-wide coordination of digitalisation projects involving cultural heritage institutions. The supported projects represent a cross-section of the cultural landscape in Berlin. As of 2017, 59 projects in 30 institutions have been assisted in total.