Innovation & Services

We have developed a suite of services designed to innovate how heritage materials are brought together, organised, and presented to the public. Our services are available as a fully integrated platform that can be implemented on-premises, or as modular components to enhance existing stacks.

Data

Transform scattered collections into interconnected repositories, enabling rich thematic projects and experiences

To enable a rich user experience, it's often necessary to bring together data from heterogeneous sources, ensuring it is effectively interlinked. With today digital landscape's dynamic demands, growing sources, frequent updates, and requirements for public participation, scalable, decentralised approaches are needed. To power high-quality experiences, data often requires enhancement, linkage to external semantic resources and better interconnectedness (Linked Data). Our data services are delivering these demands across a variety of projects.

Core Aggregator Platform

The aggregator platform is a mature solution, built on top of the powerful open-source framework Directus.io. The aggregator brings together heritage data from heterogeneous sources, maps it to the versatile internal format, and publishes it according to the preferred output format, such as Europeana Data Model (EDM).
Support for Formats & Standards

The system is designed to handle various semantic formats and standards used in the cultural heritage domain, such as MARC, Dublin Core, MODS, METS, and EDM, in addition to custom formats. A flexible AI-based mapping architecture allows quick onboarding of new formats.
Headless CMS

Built using the Headless CMS approach, the platform's data backend is fully separated from its various frontends through an open API. This separation makes possible smooth integration of new portals, apps, platforms, or any other channels to engage with audiences.
Developer API

After data is aggregated, it becomes accessible to any in-house or third-party developer via various APIs: the traditional OAI-PMH protocol, REST API, and IIIF protocol.
Long-term Preservation

The aggregation platform offers a built-in integration with a long-term preservation solution compatible with the European standard for long-term preservation, E-ARK. This ensures that any institutional or private collection can be readily provided with a long-term preservation service.

Leverage AI's progress to enrich and complete your collections

As AI is revolutionising various domains, cultural heritage is no exception. AI can become transformative, addressing the significant gaps in data completeness and quality that challenge heritage institutions. By filling these gaps, AI can enrich heritage experiences, making them more engaging and informative. However, the usage of AI necessitates robust guardrails to ensure data integrity and trustworthiness, transparency of AI operations, identifying and minimisation of bias encoded in existing heritage collections.

Generative AI / LLM

Leverages AI to create meaningful content, experiences, and interactions derived from heritage datasets.

Machine Translation

Using data models trained specifically on heritage content, this service offers automatic translation of content and metadata into new languages, ensuring high quality and accuracy.

Semantic Enrichment

This service enhances heritage collections by drawing additional data from authoritative data sources. It adds a layer of knowledge to collections, making them more usable, discoverable, and complete for various use cases. Examples of semantic enrichment include adding biographical information on people or information about geographical locations mentioned in heritage data.

Image Recognition

AI-based image recognition methods enable the extraction of meaningful visual objects—such as people, buildings, and artifacts—from massive image banks, streamlining their description and cataloging.

OCR

OCR techniques can reliably recognize typed and even handwritten texts in documents, postcards, and letters.

Transcription, Subtitling, Captioning

Leveraging LLMs, this suite of services generate additional layers of data for digital objects: transcription for typed and handwritten objects, subtitles for audio, and meaningful text captions for images.

Anonymisation

To ensure privacy and compliance, this service anonymizes records by obfuscating instances of personal data before making collections available for public access, research, or other purposes.

Storytelling

Explore diverse storytelling formats to present your narratives in the most compelling way

Today, high-quality heritage collections are not sufficient to captivate and engage audiences. As the bar for engagement is higher than ever, effective storytelling is necessary. It requires a blend of creativity, the integration of diverse sources and publishing modalities, and the ambition to reach audiences far and wide. It's about crafting narratives not only to inform but also to inspire, connecting people to the past in creative and meaningful ways.

Map-based Stories

Transforms geo-located datasets into narratives presented on maps. It will offer the audience a memorable, graphical, and immersive way to explore heritage.
Guided Tours

Use heritage collections to create walkable, self-guided, location-aware audio tours for the modern, mobile audience. The tours immerse travelers in local history through their mobile devices.
Digital Stories

Telling the unique narratives of your heritage collections through customly designed stories optimized for any device or web.
Timelines

For chronological collections and narratives, this service offers storytelling through timelines.

Publishing

Extend your reach by showcasing your content on popular platforms or by launching one of your own

To effectively reach diverse audiences, heritage content must be available on various public and private platforms, each with its own requirements, formats, and business models. The traditional Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) approach, focused on one-time publishing in a recognised standard on a single platform, is becoming insufficient due to rapid platform turnover, evolving standards, and the dynamic lifecycle of content. Instead, there's a growing need for flexible and scalable architectures that work simultaneously with multiple platforms without creating data silos. This requires understanding diverse publishing requirements, building modular and layered stacks, and maintaining constant openness to change.

Judaica Europeana

As an accredited partner of Europeana for Jewish content, JHN operates the Judaica Europeana aggregator, bringing together and delivering to the Europeana portal over 500,000 high-quality digital records, sourced from more than 20 Jewish institutions worldwide, and providing a broad panorama of European Jewish heritage and history. We are constantly expanding the collection present on Europeana and you are welcome to join the network.

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Jewish History and Heritage Hub for DP.LA

Launched in 2024, the hub is a collaboration between JHN and the Center of Jewish History. It aims to make Jewish collections widely accessible on DP.LA..

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Custom Portal

For a tailored digital presence, this service offers the creation of a custom portal, designed to meet specific requirements regarding presentation, customer journey, and search functionalities.
IIIF

Embrace the increasingly popular media interoperability IIIF standard facilitate the instant availability of your collections on various IIIF-compatible research and engagement platforms.
Data Space

Prepare your collections for the future of publishing by aligning with the requirements of data spaces. These next-generation data sharing initiatives represent the new frontier of digital content sharing.

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