Sune Sundahl’s Collection as a Testbed

A testbed for digital cultural heritage work.

In 2024 and 2025, ArkDes is participating in a testbed as part of the project Digitala museilyftet ↗. The aim is to develop new methods for how museums and other cultural institutions can work with linked open data.

What is linked open data?

Linked open data is structured, machine-readable information that can be freely used, shared, and connected with other data on the web. This enables new insights and, in our case, a more unified cultural heritage.

The testbed functions as both a test and demonstration environment for the project’s advanced training programme. It also aims to show how these methods can make collections interoperable—meaning they can be connected and used together.

About Digitala museilyftet

Digitala museilyftet ↗ is a three-year professional development programme run by The Swedish National Heritage Board ↗, co-funded by the European Social Fund ↗. Launched in 2023, it is aimed at staff at the national museums in Stockholm.

About the testbed

Sune Sundahl’s photographs make up a vast photographic collection. Acquired by ArkDes in 1988, it primarily consists of images of buildings across Sweden, taken throughout much of the 20th century. What makes Sundahl’s work unique is his inclusion of people in his architectural photography—a way of showing how buildings were actually used and giving life to the cities.

Digitisation of the collection has been ongoing for several years, and around 50,000 images are currently available via DigitaltMuseum ↗. The goal is to digitise the entire collection in high resolution and with detailed, individual-level metadata. However, searchability remains limited. This is due in part to unstructured data generated in the digitisation process—i.e., the transition from analog to digital—and in part to incomplete geographic metadata.

For users, this means it can be difficult to locate specific images without browsing the entire collection. By organising the geographic data and applying linked open data methods, the collection can become more interoperable. This will make it easier for researchers and other users to search, interpret, and analyse the material—and to discover related content that may exist in other collections.

When overlaps across collections become visible, it becomes possible to build and share a richer, more multifaceted understanding of our cultural heritage. For this to happen at a broader scale, more institutions must adopt similar methods and apply them to their own collections. The testbed is designed to lay the foundation for such a method—one that is scalable and supports long-term collaboration across institutions.

By presenting these methods through the training programme’s digital platform, ArkDes is offering other cultural institutions the opportunity to try out this approach in practice—especially those that may not have worked with linked open data before or are looking for more effective ways to make their collections more accessible.

ArkDes is contributing to Digitala museilyftet with a testbed based on Sune Sundahl’s collection, developing methods for linked open data within the cultural heritage sector.