Alvin is a national technical platform for the dissemination and
long term preservation of
digitised cultural heritage and digital collections in
Sweden
Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
. The platform contains material from several Swedish
cultural heritage
Cultural heritage is the heritage of tangible and intangible heritage assets of a group or society that is inherited from past generations. Not all heritages of past generations are "heritage"; rather, heritage is a product of selection by soci ...
organisations, and is operated and developed at
Uppsala University Library
The Uppsala University Library ( sv, Uppsala universitetsbibliotek) at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, consists of 11 subject libraries, one of which is housed in the old main library building, Carolina Rediviva. The library holds books a ...
in collaboration with
Gothenburg University Library and
Lund University Library
Lund University Libraries is a network of public research libraries in Lund, Sweden.
References
Literature
*
External links
Official site (English)Main branch, official site (English)
{{Authority control
Academic libraries in Sweden ...
through the Alvin
consortium
A consortium (plural: consortia) is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for ...
.
History
Alvin as a system originated from several different projects that Uppsala University Library ran or participated in during a period between 2000-2014:
* Creating a database to handle
Erik Waller's extensive autograph collection
* The management of the university library's digitized map and image collections through the image database Bildsök (sv. "Image Search")
* The
provenance
Provenance (from the French ''provenir'', 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art but is now used in similar senses i ...
and material bibliographic database ProBok, which was a collaboration between Uppsala University Library and the University Library at Lund University
* The archive and handwriting infrastructure Ediffah, where several different Swedish
research libraries
A research library is a library which contains an in-depth collection of material on one or several subjects.(Young, 1983; p. 188) A research library will generally include an in-depth selection of materials on a particular topic or set of to ...
collaborated
These differing and technically diverse projects made it obvious to those involved that the management, operation and further development of these projects were both person-dependent and unsustainable in a long-term perspective. Something needed to be done to increase the coordination of the cultural heritage field, to get the systems to talk to each other, and to give the organisations involved the time and opportunity to update outdated technology in pace with technological progress.
The concept that then came to be Alvin was formulated in 2011 in a final report for the project LUPP. In order to remedy the person-dependence and to prevent services from losing their technical relevance over time, a common platform should be launched.
The basic technical development of Alvin took place between 2012 and 2014 during the infrastructure project ArkA-D.
[Skärlund, Veronika]
"Digitaliserat kulturarv"
"Ergo"
', Uppsala, 7 March, 2012. Retrieved on 5 May 2019. Finally, this project culminated in Alvin being launched at the conference ''Digitalisera - men sen då?'' (sv. "Digitise - but then what?"), at the
Nordic Museum
The Nordic Museum ( sv, Nordiska museet) is a museum located on Djurgården, an island in central Stockholm, Sweden, dedicated to the cultural history and ethnography of Sweden from the early modern period (in Swedish history, it is said t ...
November 28, 2014.
References
Citations
Bibliography
"About Alvin" info.alvin-portal.org/about-alvin/about-alvin/. Accessed June 24, 2020.
"Background and history" wiki.epc.ub.uu.se/display/alvininfo. Accessed June 24, 2020.
External links
* {{official, https://www.alvin-portal.org/
Alvin wiki
Cultural heritage of Sweden
Swedish digital libraries