Museums: Digitization policy of cultural heritage in Lithuania and its implementation in Lithuanian museums

The Lithuanian Integrated Museums Information System (LIMIS) program will unite digitized museum pieces and provide a chance to collect the data about thousands of museum displays in Lithuania.

Firstly LIMIS project will be implemented in 19 museums – 4 national and 15 state and later it will involve all the other museums (67 municipal, 22 departmental and private museums), informs the IT-technologies portal Times.lv.

Today only the most unique and rare museum displays are being digitized. The museums of Lithuania hold about 6 mil. treasures. The project was launched in 2004 on the basis of 3 museums of Lithuania – the Lithuanian Art Museum, the Lithuanian National Gallery n.a. M. K. Čiurlionis and the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum.

The Head of the Lithuanian Museums’ Centre for Information Danutė Mikutienė claims that all the museums display a keen interest in the digitization process, but not all of them have enough intellectual potential and equipment to carry it out.

The LIMIS program will be carried out in two stages and last 30 months. During the first stage about 250 thousand exhibits will be digitized, around 100 thousand of museum pieces are kept in the Lithuanian Art Museum. The total sum of the project is reported to amount to 5.5 mil. litai (69,3 mil. rubles).