Services | Specialisms

Dienstverlening | Specialismes

In-house knowledge and experience

Many museums, universities and cultural heritage centres acknowledge that due to the wide variety of works of arts and other cultural objects, no single model or standard suffices to describe cultural artifacts. An object’s materiality, function and purpose, as well as its size, requirements and focus of the institute and collection, influence the descriptive depth of the data attributed to the object by cultural documentarians. Metadata in the museum and cultural heritage sector refer to the information that trained cultural documentation specialists (archivists, librarians, museum registrars and curators) create to index, structure, analyse, describe, identify, interpret or otherwise specify works of art, architecture, cultural objects and their visual representations. We offer tailored guidelines for the description of art, architecture, and develop frameworks for cataloguing works of art and other cultural objects. We can fall back on the following knowledge and all kinds of experience that we have gained over the years:

SERVICE AND SPECIALISMS

Cataloguing works of art and literary sources, text editing, transcription and annotation of historical source texts, iconographical and technical description of works of arts and other artifacts.

Development of guidelines for digitisation, development of metadata categories, and advice for the implementation of search functionality in user interfaces.

KNOWLEDGE

  • Knowledge of early modern art, including (Christian) iconography and art theory. Specialised in Renaissance and Baroque Painting and Portraiture.

  • Theological knowledge of (Christian) source texts about art, memorative culture, spirituality and materiality, and the functionality of religious objects and other types of ritual artifacts.

  • Knowledge of old manuscripts and archives.

  • Knowledge of paleographic methods for transcribing old manuscripts written in Early New Dutch (including East Dutch of the Lower Saxon areas) and source text written in Kurrent (German cursive).

  • Knowledge of heraldry, numismatics and early modern court culture and etiquette.

  • Knowledge of immaterial/intangible heritage (from the Middle Ages to the present), ranging from folk customs to video games.

  • Knowledge of cultural history of Western Europe.

  • Knowledge of metadata standards (IsoCat, Clarin).

  • Knowledge of most Germanic and Romance languages, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Yiddish.

  • Part of a large network of specialists in the field of the arts and humanities, including the museum and academic world.

  • Knowledge of Western music history from baroque to blues, from renaissance to rap.

  • Knowledge of Art of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

  • Understanding of liturgical practice and rituals.

  • Knowledge of bibliographic and heuristic methods.

  • Extensive knowledge of the current art debate and discourse in the humanities.

  • Understanding of art criticism and art theory from the 15th century to the present and its art historical interpretation.

  • Knowledge of symbolism and symbolic signs, Early Modern cryptography, enciphering signatures and unusual abbreviations, runic and runiform inscriptions, ligatures, and tamghas.

  • Knowledge of spiritual and magical traditions in Western Europe.

  • Knowledge of Western European heritage and local history.

  • We have our own private libraries with extensive literature on European art from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century and have access to documentation and source material elsewhere.

EXPERIENCE

  • Experience with portrait identification, genealogical research, reconstruction of contextual circumstances and art-historical provenance research.

  • Experience with attribution of paintings based on connoisseurship and scientific research methods. (Where our own knowledge falls short, we can call upon or mediate with specialists in the international art world.)

  • Experience with the systematic digitisation of source texts (diplomatic transcription, transliteration, conversion to modern and comprehensible language, translation of foreign languages into English, German and other languages)

  • Experience with mediation between researchers and programmers and connecting humanities with computing sciences.

  • Experience with the development of metadata categories and ontologies for databases and websites (See for example: RemDoc.org and RemBench.org)

  • Experience with giving advice for the development of digital user environments and interfaces for museums and institutes in the field of the humanities.

  • Experience with analysis of user-friendliness and testing of functionality of websites/search interfaces through experimental user research.

  • Management of project staff, such as translators and editors, developers.

  • Experience with setting up digital platforms and organising discussion groups.

  • Experience with database input, documentation, and physical object description

  • Experience with compiling catalogue raisonnés and collection catalogs (PortHis, Seybold, HiDuViGa).

  • Experience with converting complex narrative structures and large data collections into manageable subsets through the development of tailor-made information accesses (classification models, automatic indexing, categorisation, summarizing).

  • Experience with artists and artist projects.

  • Experience with metadata mapping.

  • Experience with developing web tools for faceted search.