I've been working in this space for the last 6 years. One of the challenges of these efforts is the funding model -- a lot of the work is funded through grants. If a grant funds a project for 5-10 years, maybe 80-90% goes towards conservation and digitization of the material, leaving a relatively small amount of funding for sharing the material online. As a result the websites (and related tech) tends to be fragmented even within the same organization. Usually the folks building the website are brought in as short-term contractors who tend to use the tech of the day.
In the last couple years there has been a renewed interest among culture heritage organizations to create and formalize technology standards. International Image Interoperability Framework (http://iiif.io/) is one of those efforts and has resulted in a couple of good open projects. Of course there are many more budding standards and open/closed SaaS and COTS products, but the industry is improving. As more folks use these systems, they become more appealing to the folks offering grant money, more grants/visibility results in better offerings and more unification/exchange between organizations.
It's always exciting to see these cultural heritage project pop up on HN.
In the last couple years there has been a renewed interest among culture heritage organizations to create and formalize technology standards. International Image Interoperability Framework (http://iiif.io/) is one of those efforts and has resulted in a couple of good open projects. Of course there are many more budding standards and open/closed SaaS and COTS products, but the industry is improving. As more folks use these systems, they become more appealing to the folks offering grant money, more grants/visibility results in better offerings and more unification/exchange between organizations.
It's always exciting to see these cultural heritage project pop up on HN.