Conference Agenda

Sarpur is the Icelandic collective cultural history collection database and associated management system. Rekstrarfélag Sarps is responsible for the operation of Sarpur, which serves the majority of accredited museums in Iceland, with the order of 300 staff users which increases steadily. In total more than 60 different museums and memory institutions in Iceland currently use Sarpur.

The varied museums span from The National Museum of Iceland, The National Gallery of Iceland and Icelandic Museum of Natural History, to urban city-, folk- and art museums and small regional museums run by the municipalities as well as collections managed by non-profit organizations and private foundations. In year 2023 there were over 1,6 million registered artifacts, photographs, art works, historic sites, houses, drawings, documents, archaeological material, books, coins and intangible cultural material like site names and material from ethnological collections registered in Sarpur. Around 1,1 million of the registrations are displayed on the external web sarpur.is.

Sarpur facilitates both management and overview of Icelandic cultural heritage shared across member museums in the whole country. It enables museums to register their collections and to further process those. That means for instance managing object locations, conservation, exhibitions and outgoing loans. It also facilitates online exhibitions, crowdsourcing with the local communities as well as orders for images from the public.

Icelandic museums are often quite small compared to similar institutions abroad. This smallness has facilitated this collaborative effort of registering and managing cultural heritage in this one shared data well Sarpur. It’s opportunities are obvious when it comes to having an overview over cultural heritage in Iceland for i.e. the benefit of research, education and communication.

Currently, Rekstrarfélag Sarps is working on replacing the technical infrastructure for Sarpur including both the database and software. Present software from year 2012 will be replaced with products from the company Zetcom. The first version of Sarpur came about in 1998. All configurations and daily operations of the system will continue to be carried out at the central office of Rekstrarfélag Sarps but the affiliated institutions maintain certain ground-level functions and manage their “part” of the database.

In this presentation Rekstrarfélag Sarps will briefly introduce Sarpur and explain why and how it came about. It will iterate the significance of Sarpur for research activities in the field of digital humanities and art in the Icelandic society using examples of past- and current research projects. Opportunities in the field of education will be addressed. Pros and cons of Sarpur as a collaborative effort that started out as an experiment which resulted in a nationwide practice will be discussed. Similar examples in the field of libraries in Iceland will be mentioned. The presentation will touch on the societal benefit that may result from establishing cultural heritage databases on a national level in a small society with limited resources. If time allows future plans for Sarpur will be discussed.