Developing content management systems for museums in turkey within the frame of digital cultural heritage management's digital curation applications

KARADAĞ, Duygu Kevser. Developing Content Management Systems for Museums in Turkey within the frame of Digital Cultural Heritage Management's Digital Curation Applications, Master's Thesis, Ankara, 2019. Museums; it is one of the cultural memory bodies where our cultural values and heritage are collected, kept and preserved for future generations. With the rapid progress of technology, many processes such as activities of museums, production of cultural heritage products, preservation methods, and display conditions have also begun to change. Efforts in digitization have begun to spread rapidly and cultural heritage began to advance as a brand new discipline of digitalization efforts in the early 21st century in particular. Digital cultural heritage, which is a new concept, has emerged with the cultural heritage that has started to be digitized. Digital curation studies are used to protect, access and use digital cultural heritage, and also to maintain the lifecycle. This thesis investigates the digital curation studies on cultural heritage within the museums (public-private) in Turkey and also the current conditions of both public and private museums by evaluating content management in compliance with the standards. 54 personnel from selected museums (117 museums) participated in this study, based on voluntary participation. Within the scope of the research, we collected data by applying questionnaires and face-to-face interview method with the personnel of the museums affiliated to the Ministry of Culture, the General Directorate of Cultural Heritage and Museums. The findings were analysed and then tabulated by number, percentage, arithmetic mean, comparison and statistical tests such as chi square. As a result, it has been confirmed that museum staff in Turkey have information about digitalization and digital curation, however, they have just started to digitize institutionally and do not apply digital curation. It has been discovered that the state museums do not open their collections to the researchers and that access to the collections is subject to limited or special permissions. It is one of the proposals that the museums should be integrated into digitalization and digital curation works after they carry their collections to a system that could be managed in electronic environment as result of standardization of the museums in national perspective. We put emphasise on legal regulations about digital curation in order to be able to take part in international platforms and to follow and implement technology within the institutional framework. Keywords Cultural Heritage, Digitalization, Digital Cultural Heritage, Digital Curation, Museums, Content Management in Museums