Transcript of the video "About the Canadian Heritage Information Network"
Length of video: 00:02:47
The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) has been working in the service of the Canadian museum community for 50 years. At first, CHIN helped museums construct computerized inventories of their collections. Then in the 1990s, CHIN maintained a website where the Canadian Museum Community could find resources to improve the online visibility of their collections.
Today, CHIN continues its leadership role in technology research, documentation standards, digitization and digital preservation, and offers online resources to help museums carry out the task of managing one of their most important assets, collections data.
To make this data more searchable, CHIN has produced Nomenclature, an online bilingual Museum Cataloging tool with Parks Canada and the American Association for State and Local History.
To help bolster the online visibility of their collections, CHIN invites all Canadian heritage institutions to contribute object records to Artefacts Canada, a portal on Canada.ca with an ever-growing database of over four million records and more than one million images contributed by 500 institutions across Canada.
To help increase the online exposure of Canadian artists, CHIN has partnered with the National Gallery of Canada to host Artists in Canada, a database with information on over 40 thousand artists in Canadian collections.
CHIN works with global partners to develop international standards, like Linked Art, the Art & Architecture Thesaurus and SPECTRUM, and works with international groups to develop principles of Linked Open Data to keep data compliant with various World Wide Web transformations.
With Linked Open Data, or LOD, users can search the Web as if it were an interlinked database, make connections between different sets of data formerly stored in siloes, and ask more complex questions about diverse areas of expertise.
As early Canadian adopters, CHIN will apply Linked Open Data principles to enhance its existing resources, and will work collaboratively with heritage organizations by providing Linked open data training and resources to help produce richer content for audiences.
CHIN will continue advancing the application of new technologies and approaches with the Canadian museum community so that our Heritage is accessible, celebrated and preserved, for Canadians and the world, now and in the future.