Digitizing Cultural Heritage: Exploiting the Gap Between Standards and Individual Approach

The digitization of cultural heritage focuses on finding a way to record reality as faithfully as possible and to achieve maximum conformity in the representation of the original object in the digital world. To this end, digitization standards and recommendations have been developed that describe best practices for creating a faithful digital representation, ideally a digital surrogate. However, reality cannot be contained in a single digital file; to better describe it we need to create several, each representing different characteristics of the original object. This brings me to the topic of the paper, I want to focus on the space that lies between the original object and its standardized representation. Therefore, at the National Gallery in Prague we are developing a more complex approach that combines standardization with individual imaging. We focus on capturing different aspects of the work using specific lighting techniques and capture methods. We are trying to document these individual approaches as a complement to the standards, thus enriching the metadata of the object. The aim is to disrupt the concept that a single digital document can replace the original, and to show that complex digitization requires a wide range of documented and repeatable approaches that are applied variably to individual objects.