Documenting culture and digital archival collections. Example of the Polish Literary Bibliography (PLB) and the Polish Television Archives

Abstract

The article is a case study of cooperation between scientific documentary and bibliographic working group – the Working Group of Current Bibliography (WGCB) of the Institute of Literary Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences, the creator of the Polish Literary Bibliography – and the Polish Television Archives. The cooperation initiated by the WGCB aimed at collecting, in digital form, metadata of archival holdings of the Polish Television (TVP), that were supposed to enrich data resources of the PLB. The case was described in a multi-faceted manner: I) the context was depicted on the basis of merit, i.e. information needs of the PLB on the background of the up-to-date range of television recordings of literature reception and on the background of changing information sources (atrophy of printed sources, arising possibilities of processing digital sources); II) the process of starting the cooperation with the Archives was described, especially the problem of using metadata from an archival database for documenting not particular archival units, but abstractly perceived cultural phenomena (a broadcast, a TV programme, etc.); III) analysis of technical problems with processing data was depicted (results of cooperation between institutions with own data models, created for different purposes); IV) conclusions from the case study were presented: a) about the procedural side of cooperation in using metadata from heritage institutions (the context of metadata standards, various traditions of creating them, and contemporary institutional purposes of managing them); b) about the broader (“soft”) problem of “understanding data” (data literacy) in scientific and cultural institutions.