Cultural Heritage Content Research Articles

A framework for cultural heritage content organisation, dissemination and communication in large-scale virtual environments

Cultural heritage promotion is an emerging trend for cultural organisations which take advantage of informatics and virtual environments for this purpose. Virtual environments are an effective media for cultural content communication combining existing communication media and providing diverse interaction methods. In this paper, these methods are tested for their effectiveness and appropriateness under certain conditions while usability issues are addressed. In many cases, there is demand for the content to be organised and be available to other systems. Virtual environments do not provide content organisation and content dissemination functionality, thus, a framework providing them is proposed. A database RDBMS is used for keeping the content according to an appropriately designed information schema that further organises it. Dissemination requirements are taken into consideration and add-on mechanisms are designed to provide access to the content and dissemination services adapted to the modern World Wide Web technologies.

Study on the City Color Planning Strategy Based on the Historical Context Inheritance — Take Bailu Town, Pengzhou City, Sichuan Prov. China for Example

With the promotion of living standard, the requirements of the life environment quality also continues to increase, but city presents the color problems go against the requirements and has affected the life quality. City color is an important part of the living environment and the carrier of the city's historical context. The scientific methods and Strategies of city color planning will play an important role in city construction and environmental regulation. In this paper, through the field research of the color in Bailu town and the color extraction and summary of Its natural environment, historical buildings, public service facilities, marking systems, advertising signs, ground pavement, we have put forward the future city color palette of Bailu in elegant gray and light color, created a "elegant gray light make-up at White Hart" color landscape, demonstrated the planning target of Chinese and Western town charm. And we have also make the district color planning control in Bailu color landscape, Trying to create the visual experience of the Western Sichuan, and a small town that can talk with color. In this paper, we explore the city color planning strategy of Bailu town based on the local cultural heritage content, combined with the actual case which Enriched the local cultural heritage content and connotation of the city, Emphasized the importance of local culture inheritance in color, Perfect the relevant content of city design. Through in-depth analysis of the inheritance and development of local culture in the case of city color planning in Bailu town in specific, to provide a practical reference for the color planning of small cities and towns with traditional cultural charm, and also provide a certain foundation and platform for the study of the city color planning of small cities and towns from the perspective of local culture in the future.

Cultural Heritage Information: Access and Management. Ian Ruthven and G. G. Chowdhury (eds).

Cultural Heritage Information: Access and Management. Ian Ruthven and G. G. Chowdhury (eds). London: Facet Publishing, 2015. 253 pp. ISBN: 9781856049306. £64.95 (paperback). This monograph presents a comprehensive overview of digital cultural heritage initiatives and issues from a broad theoretical perspective as well as through current research projects and activities. Both recognized experts in the field, Ian Ruthven (Professor of Information Seeking and Retrieval, University of Strathclyde, UK) and Gobinda Chowdhury (Professor of Information Science and Head of the Department of Mathematics and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, UK) have assembled a volume of well-structured contributions written in accessible terms that explain complex concepts clearly. This book will be invaluable to information science students, professionals working in libraries, museums, and archives, and those interested in learning about the current state of affairs in the field of digital cultural heritage information management from an information science perspective. The title of this collection is slightly imprecise, since the volume focuses almost exclusively on the ‘digital’ landscape of cultural heritage—rather than cultural heritage generally speaking—from digitization to information systems architecture to crowdsourcing projects and user outreach, and the consideration of relevant social, cultural, and economic factors at all stages. There is no discussion of material selection or acquisition policies and processes, since most of the cultural heritage materials under discussion are already in institutional holdings. Instead, this work emphasizes initiatives at cultural heritage institutions to create digital resources for existing collections, and to make them available to a wider audience: as one contributor notes, ‘we are now at a juncture where institutions are expected to provide digital versions of their holdings’ (p. 82). The two fundamental challenges at this point are therefore dealing with ‘the heterogeneous nature of many cultural heritage collections and the growing need to provide non-specialist users with access to cultural heritage content’ (p. 197). Awareness of cultural heritage preservation techniques and issues in … ksmith11{at}stanford.edu

IFLA Journal special issue on Cultural Heritage

Cultural Heritage (CH) consists of tangible and intangible, natural and cultural, movable and immovable assets inherited from the past. It is of extremely high value for the present and the future of a country. Access, preservation, and education around cultural heritage are essential for the evolution of people and their culture. CH preservation and conservation management present unique practices and challenges worldwide. In Africa these are amplified by the number of languages and indigenous knowledge systems, the range of economic conditions, varying climates, and histories that encompass ancient civilizations and post-colonial realities. This special issue aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of CH preservation and highlights case studies and practices from within the cultural heritage community and context. In particular, the main goal of this issue is to gather interdisciplinary and inter-professional research on CH in African libraries, but not excluding other continents; the use of new technologies in protecting, restoring, and preserving CH; the use of digitization, documentation, and preventive conservation to make CH content accessible; and the impact of natural disasters and conflict on preserving CH (African case studies). With the 81st IFLA General Conference and Assembly taking place in Africa this year, the need for dynamic libraries is expressed. The Congress theme ‘Dynamic Libraries: Access, Development and Transformation’ is of critical importance to strengthen democracy on the African continent and to eradicate poverty, illiteracy, and unemployment. The preservation and restoration of CH has always been a priority for IFLA. It is essential to monitor areas at risk, to advocate for and raise awareness about conflict and disaster prevention. With an increase in CH being abused for political propaganda and destroyed to serve certain agendas, the protection of CH has never been more important. The editors compiled a range of articles that represent contributions from Algeria, India, Flanders (Belgium), South Africa, Jamaica, Germany and the United States. The review article provides some thought-provoking recommendations on the role of libraries and librarians in preserving, promoting, and advancing indigenous CH. Through this special issue, the editors hope to highlight the case studies and current research on cultural heritage from the perspectives of libraries and archives.

Opening Access to collections: the making and using of open digitised cultural content

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to situate the activity of digitisation to increase access to cultural and heritage content alongside the objectives of the Open Access Movement (OAM). It demonstrates that increasingly open licensing of digital cultural heritage content is creating opportunities for researchers in the arts and humanities for both access to and analysis of cultural heritage materials.Design/methodology/approach– The paper is primarily a literature and scoping review of the current digitisation licensing climate, using and embedding examples from ongoing research projects and recent writings on Open Access (OA) and digitisation to highlight both opportunities and barriers to the creation and use of digital heritage content from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM).Findings– The digital information environment in which digitised content is created and delivered has changed phenomenally, allowing the sharing and reuse of digital data and encouraging new advances in research across the sector, although issues of licensing persist. There remain further opportunities for understanding how to: study use and users of openly available cultural and heritage content; disseminate and encourage the uptake of open cultural data; persuade other institutions to contribute their data into the commons in an open and accessible manner; build aggregation and search facilities to link across information sources to allow resource discovery; and how best to use high-performance computing facilities to analyse and process the large amounts of data the author is now seeing being made available throughout the sector.Research limitations/implications– It is hoped that by pulling together this discussion, the benefits to making material openly available have been made clear, encouraging others in the GLAM sector to consider making their collections openly available for reuse and repurposing.Practical implications– This paper will encourage others in the GLAM sector to consider licensing their collections in an open and reusable fashion. By spelling out the range of opportunities for researchers in using open cultural and heritage materials it makes a contribution to the discussion in this area.Social implications– Increasing the quantity of high-quality OA resources in the cultural heritage sector will lead to a richer research environment which will increase the understanding of history, culture and society.Originality/value– This paper has pulled together, for the first time, an overview of the current state of affairs of digitisation in the cultural and heritage sector seen through the context of the OAM. It has highlighted opportunities for researchers in the arts, humanities and social and historical sciences in the embedding of open cultural data into both their research and teaching, whilst scoping the wave of cultural heritage content which is being created from institutional repositories which are now available for research and use. As such, it is a position paper that encourages the open data agenda within the cultural and heritage sector, showing the potentials that exists for the study of culture and society when data are made open.

A metadata model and mapping approach for facilitating access to heterogeneous cultural heritage assets

In the last decade, Europe has put a tremendous effort into making cultural, educational and scientific resources publicly available. Based on national or thematic aggregators, initiatives like Europeana nowadays provide a plethora of cultural resources for people worldwide. Although such massive amounts of rich cultural heritage content are available, the potential of its use for educational and scientific purposes still remains largely untapped. Much valuable content is only available in the so-called long tail, i.e. in niche resources such as specifically themed cultural heritage collections, and are difficult to access from the mainstream hubs like major search engines, social networks or online encyclopaedias. The vision of the EEXCESS project is to push high-quality content from the long tail to platforms and devices which are used every day. The realisation of such use cases requires as a basis (and in addition to the functional components) a common metadata representation and tools for mapping between the data sources' specific data models and this common representation. In this paper, we propose a data model for such a system that combines federated search results from different cultural heritage data sources. We then propose an approach for metadata mapping, with a focus on easy configurability of mappings, which--once properly configured--can then be executed on the fly by an automatic service. We demonstrate the approach using a real-world example.

Heritage and society: strategic guidelines for the digitization of the Lithuanian cultural heritage for the 2014–2020 programming period

The article focuses on the strategic management of digitization in Lithuania. It elaborates on the development process of a conceptual approach to the creation of seamless content of the digital cultural heritage and presents the changing social context and a new paradigm of the legislation on the cultural heritage as well as its financing issues.The period of 2005–2009 should be considered a turning point in the cultural policy of Lithuania as the approval of the Concept for the Digitization of the Lithuanian Cultural Heritage and the Strategy for the Digitization of the Lithuanian Cultural Heritage, Digital Content Preservation and Access and its Implementation Framework in 2009–2013 by the Lithuanian government, which resulted in a new paradigm for the consolidation of memory institutions, oriented to cross-sectoral collaboration in digitizing Lithuania’s cultural heritage. These documents also provided more possibilities to receive financial support from the State budget and the EU Structural Funds for the digitization of the national cultural heritage and its long-term preservation and access. The major unsolved problems of the previous period have evolved from the inappropriate interpretation of strategic documents within the institutional environment. When interpreting these documents, conservative non-compatible institutional models were applied for strategic managing. Therefore, digitization was carried out without fully evaluating the social context and consolidating resources, thus resulting in poor quality digitization products, which were unrelated and satisfied the needs of institutions rather than of the users.The environment of the strategic management in the new programming period of 2014–2020 is shaped by the development of the network society, as it is defined by social sciences, the experience of the previous strategic period, and the highest level strategic documents defining the new period. The article also introduces the experience of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania and Vilnius University’s Faculty of Communication, activities by these and other twenty main cultural institutions of Lithuania in the development of the cultural and information society policy and the strategic management of cultural heritage digitization, and initiatives within these activities for the 2014–2020 programming period.

So you want to reuse digital heritage content in a creative context? Good luck with that.

Although there is a lot of digitised cultural heritage content online, it is still incredibly difficult to source good material to reuse, or material that you are allowed to reuse, in creative projects. What can institutions do to help people who want to invest their time in making and creating using digitised historical items as inspiration and source material?

Study on Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection of the Architectural Cultural Heritage

In the current context of globalization and regional characteristics of urban and rural culture general lacking, due to the long history and has the heavy connotation, the historical cultural heritage reflected the rich local culture and traditional cultural imprint. According to the definition, the content and relationship of material cultural heritage and intangible cultural heritage, this paper intensively study the non-material cultural heritage factors loaded by buildings architecture cultural heritage, and presented the problems and coping methods during the course of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Protection.

Research on the Knowledge Character and Classification of Intangible Cultural Heritage

As the knowledge of intangible cultural heritage is the experience which is accumulated for a long time, it is difficult to express the complex relationships completely. In order to preserve the content of intangible cultural heritage effectively, the knowledge should be classified by a rational standard. Firstly, this paper discussed the special character and information processing technology of intangible culture heritage; Secondly, the classification of intangible cultural heritage is designed based on its character and the theory of knowledge classification, and then a knowledge modeling framework for intangible cultural heritage is designed based on this classification. Application has proved that it is feasible and effective, and could help the users to master the knowledge and its relationship from various perspectives.

A Data Infrastructure for Digital Cultural Heritage: Characteristics, Requirements and Priority Services

The European amount of digitized material is growing very rapidly, as national, regional and European programmes support the digitization processes by museums, libraries, archives, archaeological sites, and audiovisual repositories. The generation of digital cultural heritage is accelerated also by the impulse of Europeana that is fostering the European cultural institutions to produce even more digital content. Moreover digital cultural heritage content are complex and interlinked through many relations. European countries are working for the future, in order to create a data infrastructure devoted to cultural heritage research. Currently, Europe have twin projects (DC-NET and INDICATE) ongoing and a new international coordination action is under preparation to design a validated roadmap for the preservation of digital cultural content. These initiatives are contributing to smooth the way to the Open Science Infrastructure for Digital Cultural Heritage, which is foreseen in 2020.

A quantitative evaluation of query expansion in domain specific information retrieval

AbstractThis paper describes our different retrieval approaches conducted on a cultural heritage (CH) content test‐collection. In our study, our main objective is to measure the relative merit of various query expansion and semantic enrichment techniques. To do so we considered different strategies based on blind‐query expansion as well as using external resource, namely Wikipedia. In using external knowledge bases we consider different strategies in order to select the most appropriate concepts to be added to the initial query. Our results show that expansion with both pseudo‐relevant documents and external resources improve the retrieval. While the impact of expansion using an external resource is more significant.

Fiction literature as linked open data—The BookSampo dataset

The BookSampo dataset provides information as linked data on fiction literature published in Finland going back to the 15th century, along with rich descriptions of both their content and context. The dataset contains data on nearly 400,000 subjects, including literary works, authors, book covers, reviews, awards, images, and movies, over 3 million triples in total. The data has been applied as the basis of the BookSampo portal in public use in Finland, and is aligned with the cross-domain cultural heritage contents and ontologies of CultureSampo, another in-use semantic portal. The data has been used to answer complex questions, such as what topics should one write about, if one wants to get a literary award based on statistics. The metadata was transformed into RDF from legacy library databases, then enriched manually by dozens of librarians in a Web 2.0 fashion in Finnish public libraries, and is constantly updated at a rate of some new 90,000 triples monthly.

Disaster Risk Assessment Methods and Response Plans for Cultural Heritage in Taiwan

Precaution and preparation, as established in emergency plans, are the most effective means of disaster mitigation and heritage protection. Emergency plans should include evaluation of cultural heritage assets, including buildings, both contents and structures, as well as surroundings and landscapes. These frameworks are based on common experience and reflect viewpoints shared worldwide. However, due to regulations imposed in Taiwan, it is difficult to achieve the goal of preserving cultural and historical heritages. This project analyzes the fire risk assessment of historical architectures and develops a new fire risk assessment method, as well as improved protection recommendations for Lukang Lung–shan Temple, an important national heritage property in Taiwan. The survey techniques and assessment procedures used in this case study can also be modified and applied to all heritage buildings. This enables heritage property managers and supporting organizations to construct fire emergency preparation and damage control plans suitable to a specific case.

Computing similarity between items in a digital library of cultural heritage

Large amounts of cultural heritage content have now been digitized and are available in digital libraries. However, these are often unstructured and difficult to navigate. Automatic techniques for identifying similar items in these collections could be used to improve navigation since it would allow items that are implicitly connected to be linked together and allow sets of similar items to be clustered. Europeana is a large digital library containing more than 20 million digital objects from a set of cultural heritage providers throughout Europe. The diverse nature of this collection means that the items do not have standard metadata to assist navigation. A range of methods for computing the similarity between pairs of texts are applied to metadata records in Europeana in order to estimate the similarity between items. Various methods for computing similarity have been proposed and can be classified into two main approaches: (1) knowledge-based, which make use of external knowledge sources and (2) corpus-based approaches, which rely on analyzing the frequency distributions of words in documents. Both techniques are evaluated against manual judgements obtained for this study and a multiple-choice test created from manually generated categories in cultural heritage collections. We find that a combination of corpus and knowledge-based approaches provide the best results in both experiments.

Bulgariana: A Bulgarian Aggregator to Europeana

Europeana is the European virtual museum which was established in 2008. Its ambition is to create a common space allowing to access the cultural heritage of Europe from a single portal, by creating a network in all European countries. To make the initiative technically possible, Europeana has built a technological infrastructure to aggregate metadata from the different Europeana countries and memory institutions, while keeping the original digitized content on their sites. This paper presents Bulgariana, the Bulgarian chapter of Europeana. It is part of the technical infrastructure of Europeana, an established technical aggregator of Bulgarian cultural heritage content. It uses the two Europeana representation models ESE and EDM. Bulgariana is also a community building initiative putting in place a Bulgarian wide network of professionals and institutions working together to preserve and present Bulgarian cultural heritage around the world.

How to deal with massively heterogeneous cultural heritage data – lessons learned in CultureSampo

This paper presents the CultureSampo system from the viewpoint of publishing heterogeneous linked data as a service. Discussed are the problems of converting legacy data into linked data, as well as the challenge of making the massively heterogeneous yet interlinked cultural heritage content interoperable on a semantic level. In the approach described, the data is published not only for human use, but also as intelligent services for other computer systems that can then provide interfaces of their own for the linked data. As a concrete use case of using CultureSampo as a service, the BookSampo system for publishing Finnish fiction literature on the semantic web is presented.

Enhancing cultural heritage collections by supporting and analyzing participation in Flickr

AbstractCultural heritage institutions can enhance their collections by sharing content through popular web services. Drawing on current analyses from the Flickr Feasibility Study, we report on the pronounced increase in use of the IMLS DCC Flickr Photostream in the past year, trends in how users are engaging with the content, and data provider perspectives on participation in Flickr through the DCC. In addition to users providing comments and tags for images, they are increasingly integrating historical images from libraries and museums into new digital objects and special collections. Intermediary services can fill a key role in lowering the burden for institutions to engage in Web 2.0 initiatives and broadening public access to cultural heritage content. To extend the scope of the current DCC services, we propose a feedback framework for transferring user‐generated information to institutional data providers.

Bancos de imágenes para proyectos enciclopédicos: el caso de <i>Wikimedia Commons</i>

This paper presents the characteristics and functionalities of the Wikimedia Commons image databank shared by all Wikipedia projects. The process of finding images and ilustrating wikipedia articles is also explained, along with how to add images to the bank. The role of cultural institutions in promoting free and open cultural heritage content is highlighted.

온라인 역사정보서비스에 관한 연구

근세이전의 역사자료를 정보원으로 하는 역사정보시스템은 자료의 형태적, 내용적 특수성으로 인하여 일반적인 정보시스템과는 차별화된 추가적인 정보서비스의 제공이 요구되며 이는 이용자의 입장에서 이용자의 정보요구에 기초하여 고려되어야 한다. 본 연구에서는 문헌조사를 통하여 온라인 역사정보 서비스의 다양성을 분석하는 기준을 제시하였으며 제시한 분석기준을 바탕으로 국내외 역사정보서비스의 제공현황과 이용현황을 조사하고, 이용자의 정보요구를 파악하여 이용자 중심의 역사정보서비스 개선방안을 제시하였다.