Linked Data and Family Archives: What Heritage Institutions Taught Us

How the archival standards used by national libraries and museums can help ordinary families preserve their own history.

On 22 November 2019, the ADOCHS project organised an international study day on Linked Data at the KBR – Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. The event brought together archivists, researchers, and digital humanities specialists from across Europe to discuss one central question: how do we make archival data more connected, more discoverable, and more durable?

That question — asked in the context of national institutions and cultural heritage — turns out to have a direct and practical answer for families trying to preserve their own photo collections and documents.

What Is Linked Data, and Why Should Families Care?

Linked Data is a method for structuring information so that it connects meaningfully to other information — across systems, institutions, and time. When the National Archives of France publishes a document using Linked Data standards, that document doesn’t exist in isolation. It connects to dates, people, places, and events in a shared, machine-readable web of knowledge.

For a national archive, this means a researcher in Helsinki can find a document held in Brussels without knowing it exists.

For a family, it means something simpler but equally important: your photos, documents, and stories can be organised in a way that makes them findable, shareable, and lasting — not just a folder of JPEGs that nobody will know how to open in thirty years.

Key Lessons from the 2019 Study Day

The presentations at the ADOCHS Linked Data study day covered a range of institutional approaches. Several insights translate directly to personal archiving:

1. Metadata Is What Makes an Archive Searchable

Florence Clavaud of the Archives nationales de France presented the Records in Contexts (RiC) conceptual model — a framework for describing archival records in a way that preserves context, not just content.

The practical takeaway: a photo without metadata is just an image. A photo tagged with a date, a location, the names of the people pictured, and its relationship to other photos in your collection becomes a retrievable memory.

When you digitise old family photos, always add:

Full date (or estimated decade)
Location
Names of people pictured
Relationship to other photos or documents in your collection

2. Linked Open Data Makes Your Archive Interoperable

Jean-François Moufflet of the National Archives of France presented the IIIF protocol — a standard for sharing and displaying digital images across different platforms and institutions.

For families, the equivalent is choosing file formats and storage systems that don’t lock you into a single platform. JPEGs and PDFs remain readable across decades and systems. Proprietary formats from a single app may not.

3. Real-World Case Studies: Connecting Fragmented Records

The afternoon session focused on Linked Open Data applied to World War II records — a domain where fragmented, multilingual, and geographically scattered records are a constant challenge.

Anne Chardonnens of the Université Libre de Bruxelles demonstrated how spreadsheet-based records can be transformed into Linked Data through Wikibase — making previously isolated records part of a connected, searchable whole.

The parallel for families: your grandmother’s letters, your grandfather’s military papers, and a box of unlabelled photographs are all fragments of the same story. A structured digital archive connects them.

From Institutions to Individuals: The ADOCHS Approach

The ADOCHS project was built on a simple premise: the standards and methods developed by cultural heritage institutions to preserve collective memory can — and should — be made accessible to individuals preserving personal and family memory.

The tools have changed. AI now makes it possible to restore damaged photographs in minutes, identify faces in unlabelled images, and generate structured metadata automatically. What hasn’t changed is the underlying principle:

An archive is only as valuable as its organisation.

Whether you are the Royal Library of Belgium preserving centuries of manuscripts, or a family in Brussels preserving three generations of photographs, the questions are the same:

How do we capture this before it deteriorates further?
How do we organise it so it can be found?
How do we store it so it lasts?

Getting Started with Your Own Family Archive

The methods used at institutional level translate into four practical steps for individuals:

Step 1 — Digitise Scan physical photos and documents at archival resolution (600 DPI minimum for prints, 1200 DPI for negatives). Use a flatbed scanner where possible; smartphone scanning apps are acceptable for quick capture but not for primary archiving.

Step 2 — Restore Use AI-powered restoration tools to repair damage — scratches, tears, fading, water damage — before organising. Restoring before filing means your archive contains the best available version of each image.

Step 3 — Describe Add structured metadata to every file. At minimum: date, location, people, and a brief description. Use consistent naming conventions across your collection.

Step 4 — Preserve Store files in at least three locations: one local (external drive), one remote (cloud backup), one offline (archival-quality USB or M-DISC). Review and migrate storage media every five years.

Linked Data & Archives