Identification, Preservation and Management of Cultural Heritage of Edirne, Turkey by Means of a Web-Based Application

Cultural Heritage can be expressed as the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation, including places, objects, practices, customs, values and artistic expressions. The care of its historical memory reveals the degree of civilization and morality of a city and/or country. In this regard, digitization plays a key role for conserving, maintaining and sharing cultural assets.  In this study, an online access platform for conserving, maintaining and sharing the cultural assets of Edirne has been developed. Firstly, a new digitization and archiving application has been developed and integrated into existing library automation systems. Second, after obtaining their copyrights, available books, magazines and other printed materials have been scanned, indexed, abstracted and archived in the database of the online access platform. Finally, the digitized materials in the online access platform have been made publicly available. The project realized in this study will both enable to digitally conserve the available cultural assets of Edirne and hand them down to the next generations.