On-line GIS for movable cultural heritage — Possibilities and benefits

The paper presents the results of a research project connected with using Geographic Information System (GIS) - as a technology and as a tool - to integrate different digital archival collections, present their content in one space and provide online access to them from one common level - from an online map. Digital archives contain a lot of movable heritage which content has no simple relation to geographic space: manuscripts or old prints can be created in one place, they can describe other places and now they can be stored still in another place. Moreover, each archival object could be stored in many different places in the past. This paper proposes a method of creating movable heritage map, based on all geographical places connected with digital collections. The starting point of the study was the international standards for describing digital collections. They provide metadata which are the source of spatial information about archival objects and about spatial, temporal, typological and semantic relations between them. All these aspects were integrated in the GIS and presented as the prototype of an online interactive map. Proposed solutions as well as practical applications of the map are presented in the paper.