Eva Stengard

A biologist by training I took up the position as curator at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in 1989 and spent my days compiling thesauri for the use in environmental data systems. The controlled vocabularies were not so popular in the collection systems. Then in 1991 the museum needed to connect to “The Internet”. Not long after that the department installed a web server and I became the museum's first webmaster, coding web pages with a text editor. When we started publishing the museum’s collections online, our scientists saved tons of time when they got loan requests for specified objects instead of a set of search criteria. In 1995 I made a proposal on behalf of the government that heritage collections should be made available online on the internet. Since then I’ve been engaged in several initiatives regarding digital heritage such as ABM-centrum (an initiative to increase coordination of data from archives, libraries, and museums). I’ve also worked with the top-level domain dot.museum. Currently I’m a special advisor at the Ministry of Culture and among other responsibilities, I work around digital heritage policies. I still see a need for more extended use of controlled vocabularies and standards in digital heritage. I represent Sweden in the European Commission’s expert group CEDCHE. During 2023 I will serve on the Europeana Advisory Board as a representative of CEDCHE and the member states.