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The Belgian Art Links and Tools (BALaT) (http://balat.kikirpa.be/) is the continuously expanding online documentary platform of the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (KIK-IRPA), Brussels (Belgium). BALaT contains over 750 000 images of KIK-IRPA’s unique collection of photo negatives on the cultural heritage of Belgium, but also the library catalogue, PDF’s of articles form KIK-IRPA’s Bulletin and other publications, an extensive persons and institutions authority list, and several specialized thematic websites. All these are interlinked to give the user easy access to freely available information on the Belgian cultural heritage. The last years KIK-IRPA has been working on a detailed and inclusive data management plan. Through this data management plan, a new project HESCIDA (Heritage Science Data Archive) will upgrade BALaT to BALaT+, enabling access to searchable registries of KIK-IRPA datasets and data interoperability. BALaT+ will be a building block of DIGILAB, one of the future pillars of the European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science (E-RIHS), which will provide online access to scientific data concerning tangible heritage, following the FAIR-principles (Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable). It includes and enables access to searchable registries of specialized digital resources (datasets, reference collections, thesauri, ontologies, etc.); supports data interoperability through the creation of shared knowledge organization systems and provides tools to process them according to researchers’ needs and research questions. Such data will primarily consist out of measurement results and scientific information (texts, images, 3D models and more). Special attention will be given to the implementation of the IIIF protocol to enhance our research environment with not only access to KIK-IRPA’s high-resolution images of cultural heritage, but also making it possible to include images from other institutions that are IIIF compliant.
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