Cultural Heritage Institutions Research Articles

The out-of-commerce works system

A system that simplifies rights clearance now makes it possible for cultural heritage institutions in the European Union to digitise materials in their collections and legally make them available online, as long as they are not in commercial circulation. The so-called out-of-commerce works provisions, brought forward by the 2019 Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, builds upon previous attempts to close the “twentieth century blackwhole” and offers a promising solution.

Access to the European cultural heritage of settlements and towns in the Danube macro-region through interoperable strategies digital transformation

Tangible cultural heritage is a strategic resource for the development of rural and urban settlements. Cooperation with stakeholders from EU countries and regions within the Danube macro-region, such as cultural heritage institutions and competent authorities, allows to agree on the preparation and adaptation of compatible digital innovation strategies in local initiative groups in the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine, as well as on impact mapping through a set of pan-European socio-economic indicators. Objectives of the study: to analyse the available European best practices and methodology for adaptation in the integration of the regions of the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine in the interregional innovation partnership on the smart specialisation "Cultural and Creative Regional Ecosystems" (CCRE-S3) [1]. The overall horizontal objective of the integration into the platform should be to add value to the common characteristics of the cultural and creative sector and to create a permanent discovery mechanism that will carry out activities to identify strategic investments and the use of innovation transfer tools. Previous works: previous concept, research and experience are described in the articles [2] and [3]. Approach: European benchmarking, comparative analysis, bibliographic research. Outcome: recommendations aimed at stimulating new ideas and opportunities related to cultural and creative experiences for local communities and residents by involving several groups of professions that use, apply and implement new technologies in the cultural and creative industries sector. The European Programmes provide resources to support their implementation. In this way, the Danube Strategy participating States [4],  by supporting partnerships between the cultural heritage sector and other sectors such as higher education and vocational education and training, creative industries and sustainable cultural tourism, will be able to stimulate innovation for new services and applications in their regions.

Changes in Digital Collections and Their Metadata: A Longitudinal Study of UIUC Digital Library

Discussions surrounding digital libraries and their metadata have become less robust than before, given that creating and hosting digital collections have become the norm for most cultural heritage institutions over the last 20 years. Consequently, there are fewer discussions of how the characteristics of digital collections and their metadata have changed over time. This article showcases the evolution of digital collections and their metadata at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) Library in the last 20 years. It discusses the growth of its collections and their characteristics, examines historical changes in the use of metadata elements, and explores responses to the changing nature of digitized and born-digital materials. Based on a large-scale data analysis of the digital collections and their metadata housed in UIUC Digital Library, the paper also examines the challenges and opportunities of the curation and management of digital collections and digital libraries in the future.

Library in the Space of Social Transformations: Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Challenges of Digitalization

The purpose of the article is to reveal, in the genre of a personal interview, the opinion of the Director General of the Russian State Library, V.V. Duda, about the challenges that cultural heritage institutions face today, without which it is impossible to form the identity of the peoples of Russia. The peculiarity of the current moment lies not only in the need to perform its traditional function of collecting, preserving and making available the books and documents stored in the library, but also in modernization, taking into account the possibilities of digitalization, acceleration of traditional processes, diversity of services and increasing the level of comfort in serving users.The use of the interview method has certain advantages in the context of social transformation, as it is essentially a method of qualitative analysis of the situation. Targeted questions focus on specific areas of the library’s activities in the development of artificial intelligence, digital bibliography, the importance of constant contact and discourse between humanities scholars and IT staff. What kind of specialists should work in a library today, what should be the system of library staff training, how and what can help libraries in new territories, how to be creative but remain on the foundation of traditional values and creativity — these and other questions were echoed in V.V. Duda’s answers.It is important to emphasize the need to unite the efforts of the library community within the framework of the Russian Library Association, to increase its organizational role and project activity in solving the state task of developing the country’s intellectual capital.

Library in the Space of Social Transformations: Preservation of Cultural Heritage and Challenges of Digitalization

The purpose of the article is to reveal, in the genre of a personal interview, the opinion of the Director General of the Russian State Library, V.V. Duda, about the challenges that cultural heritage institutions face today, without which it is impossible to form the identity of the peoples of Russia. The peculiarity of the current moment lies not only in the need to perform its traditional function of collecting, preserving and making available the books and documents stored in the library, but also in modernization, taking into account the possibilities of digitalization, acceleration of traditional processes, diversity of services and increasing the level of comfort in serving users.The use of the interview method has certain advantages in the context of social transformation, as it is essentially a method of qualitative analysis of the situation. Targeted questions focus on specific areas of the library’s activities in the development of artificial intelligence, digital bibliography, the importance of constant contact and discourse between humanities scholars and IT staff. What kind of specialists should work in a library today, what should be the system of library staff training, how and what can help libraries in new territories, how to be creative but remain on the foundation of traditional values and creativity — these and other questions were echoed in V.V. Duda’s answers.It is important to emphasize the need to unite the efforts of the library community within the framework of the Russian Library Association, to increase its organizational role and project activity in solving the state task of developing the country’s intellectual capital.

To save a cultural heritage: Lessons from a volunteer network’s support to Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions

This paper is a short summary of the experiences from the first one and a half years of support to the Ukrainian cultural heritage sector from the international volunteer network SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online). The paper first outlines the current situation in Ukraine in the shadow of the full-scale Russian invasion and then focuses on the role of grassroots movements and the different forms of support provided by SUCHO. Finally, the paper discusses some key experiences from these efforts and addresses ideas for further support.

Making Big Bets and Leaning into Operational Excellence: Building the Future of Cultural Heritage Institutions

This theoretical article and applied case study examines the concept of academic research libraries adopting concepts that emphasize building the future rather than passively reacting through incrementalism and risk aversion which is standard practice. These include Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One” theory, Power Law concepts, and Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan theory, with the application of Lean Kaizen toward foundational existing systems. These concepts, taken together, catalyze the preparation for inevitable disruptive change. With them, there exists an opportunity to reduce the current climate of risk aversion and persistent incrementalism, stagnated growth, ineffectual leadership, and decreased morale and talent retention currently present within the industry. In a time where all industries are facing constant disruption that continues to compound, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions must take the initiative to challenge and change internally by building our future before we are disrupted by other more undesirable forces. In shifting away from incrementalism and risk-aversion, and focusing on building the future through calculated risks, constant experimentation, groundbreaking ideation, operational excellence, and strategies, libraries can redefine their roles, ensure relevance, and achieve long-term success in an ever-evolving ecosystem. This article introduces a 13-point comprehensive framework that integrates the preceding applicable theories that emphasize local innovation, agility, operational excellence, and a focus on embracing the Power Law, which contends that positive outcomes in every system are heavily skewed, and to win big we need to embrace these outliers and take balanced and calculated risks to succeed in an unknown future. This holistic approach empowers academic research libraries to revolutionize their operations, proactively address disruptions and build their future.

Collecting traces of the outside world: an alternative collective memory of the lockdown

ABSTRACT During the COVID-19 lockdown, cultural heritage institutions responded promptly to this difficult time by launching a series of digital collections of traces of this historical moment. Due to the limitations of the lockdown, such collections have generally focused on the intimate dimension of the pandemic, representing represented the outside world (streets, shops, cultural venues, etc.) as a site of emptiness. This paper examines the ‘Windows in lockdown’ initiative, which aimed to collect photographs of the messages displayed in physical locations during the lockdown period. The collection was carried out through an action research approach based on a participatory platform and social media. A collection of 1,224 photos taken in France between March and May 2020 was built. This paper analyses this collection through a social semiotics approach. The analysis highlights the role played by the outside world as a generator of an alternative collective memory during COVID-19.

Sharing South Dakota's cultural heritage: harvesting digital collections into the Digital Public Library of America and beyond

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) enables the discovery of digitized content held by U.S. cultural heritage institutions by aggregating metadata contributed from participating organizations. The DPLA differs from other resource sharing networks by providing not only the locality of an item from a catalogue such as WorldCat but offers easy access to the digitized item itself. Particularly for smaller libraries, archives, and museums, including content in the DPLA makes that content much easier for users to discover, access, and contextualize than it would be otherwise. The DPLA uses what they call the Hub Model made up of Service Hubs and Content Hubs to aggregate metadata from their partners and contribute it to DPLA. This allows state and regional collaborations to onboard small institutions, adding online texts, photographs, manuscript material, artwork and more.

Cultural heritage on the Semantic Web: The Europeana Data Model

The Semantic Web allows data to be linked on the Web and structures information for use by humans and machines. Furthermore, it makes relationships between data explicit, enabling the creation of Linked Data. Based on a literature review, the principles and technologies underlying Linked Data are presented – namely, the Resource Description Framework and models developed for libraries, archives and museums. Europeana aggregates European institutions’ digital cultural heritage, having developed a model that follows linked-data principles. For a deeper understanding of this model, the Europeana Data Model is presented with examples of two representation approaches and the advantages of metadata enrichment in information discovery. The experience of the University of Coimbra with Europeana is briefly explained. Finally, the authors discuss the challenges that cultural heritage institutions face in adopting these models and freeing their information from the silos it is in, taking advantage of the potential that Linked Data provides.

Journal of Library Outreach and Engagement - Review

The Journal of Library Outreach and Engagement offers a venue for public, school and academic librarians to share peer-reviewed original research, features and content of note for those tasked with attracting and retaining patrons at libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. Although it is relatively new and has a somewhat irregular issue count, the journal features indications of commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and follows best practices for scholarly journal publication, including open access licensing and transparent policies for potential authors.

Digital Cultural Heritage, Cybersecurity, and the Human Factor

Abstract Digital heritage, with its intellectual and cultural identity value, constitutes a significant asset. This also makes it an important asset in the cyber market. Cultural heritage institutions, recognising the vital role of digital assets, confront various information security risks and must adopt cyber threat related strategies to counter potential cyber-attacks. This paper first investigates the susceptibility of digital heritage objects to cyber threats by examining their distinctive characteristics. The study subsequently poses research enquiries concerning the cybersecurity proficiency and general awareness of cultural heritage professionals. A conducted survey in Croatia among these professionals analyses their information and computer practices related to the storage and preservation of digital cultural heritage. Findings reveal that while overall cybersecurity awareness is commendable, there exists a deficiency in cybersecurity and data protection training among cultural heritage professionals, even at the basic level. Additionally, the study highlights insufficient technical support and equipment for cybersecurity within cultural heritage institutions.

User versus institutional perspectives of metadata and searching: an investigation of online access to cultural heritage content during the COVID-19 pandemic

Findings from log analyses of user interactions with the digital content of two large national cultural heritage institutions (National Museums of Scotland and National Galleries of Scotland) during the COVID-19 lockdown highlighted limited engagement compared to pre-pandemic levels. Just 8% of users returned to these sites, whilst the average time spent, and number of pages accessed, were generally low. This prompted a user study to investigate the potential mismatch between the way content was indexed by the curators and searched for by users. A controlled experiment with ten participants, involving two tasks and a selected set of digital cultural heritage content, explored: (a) how does the metadata assigned by cultural heritage organisations meet or differ from the search needs of users? and (b) how can the search strategies of users inform the search pathways employed by cultural heritage organisations? Findings reveal that collection management standards like Spectrum encourage a variety of different characteristics to be considered when developing metadata, yet much of the content is left to the interpretations of curators. Rather, user- and context-specific guidelines could be beneficial in ensuring the aspects considered most important by consumers are indexed, thereby producing more relevant search results. A user-centred approach to designing cultural heritage websites would help to improve an individual’s experience when searching for information. However, a process is needed for institutions to form a concrete understanding of who their target users are before developing features and designs to suit their specific needs and interests.

Enriching Image Archives via Facial Recognition

The digitization of image archives across the globe has opened up vast collections of libraries, museums, and cultural heritage institutions. These collections provide valuable historical information to the public and researchers. Many image collections have little metadata describing who or what is depicted in a structured format, making it difficult to search for specific persons. This work presents a facial recognition pipeline to enrich these collections by recognizing the persons in each image. A reference dataset of over 6,000 known persons was constructed and facial recognition was performed on a dataset of over 150 thousand images. Detected faces were matched with the known faces using a similarity score on the face embeddings. We developed an interactive labeling tool to efficiently validate the face recognition predictions. A total of 182 thousand detected faces were labeled with this tool. Using a minimum similarity score of 0.5, the face recognition model achieved a precision of 0.936 and identified over 62 thousand persons from the image archives. We show how clustering can be used to identify new persons that were not included in the reference dataset. Furthermore, we highlight the potential of facial recognition to enhance the accessibility of the collections and offer new insights.

Optimization of Image Processing Algorithms for Character Recognition in Cultural Typewritten Documents

Linked data is used in various fields as a new way of structuring and connecting data. Cultural heritage institutions have been using linked data to improve archival descriptions and facilitate the discovery of information. Most archival records have digital representations of physical artifacts in the form of scanned images that are non-machine-readable. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) recognizes text in images and translates it into machine-encoded text. This article evaluates the impact of image processing methods and parameter tuning in OCR applied to typewritten cultural heritage documents. The approach uses a multi-objective problem formulation to minimize Levenshtein edit distance and maximize the number of words correctly identified with a non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) to tune the methods’ parameters. Evaluation results show that parameterization by digital representation typology benefits the performance of image pre-processing algorithms in OCR. Furthermore, our findings suggest that employing image pre-processing algorithms in OCR might be more suitable for typologies where the text recognition task without pre-processing does not produce good results. In particular, Adaptive Thresholding, Bilateral Filter, and Opening are the best-performing algorithms for the theater plays’ covers, letters, and overall dataset, respectively, and should be applied before OCR to improve its performance.

An Ontological Approach for Unlocking the Colonial Archive

Cultural Heritage institutions have been exploring new ways of making available their catalogues in digital format. Recently, new approaches have emerged as methods to reuse and make available the contents for computational purposes. This work introduces a methodology to transform digital collections into Linked Open Data following best practices. The framework has been applied to Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives based on the collection Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala provided by the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. The results of this work are publicly available. This work aims at encouraging Cultural Heritage institutions to publish and reuse their digital collections using advanced methods and techniques.

Developing responsible AI practices at the Smithsonian Institution

Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become pervasive in our everyday lives. These applications range from the mundane (asking ChatGPT to write a thank you note) to high-end science (predicting future weather patterns in the face of climate change), but, because they rely on human-generated or mediated data, they also have the potential to perpetuate systemic oppression and racism. For museums and other cultural heritage institutions, there is great interest in automating the kinds of applications at which AI and ML can excel, for example, tasks in computer vision including image segmentation, object recognition (labelling or identifying objects in an image) and natural language processing (e.g. named-entity recognition, topic modelling, generation of word and sentence embeddings) in order to make digital collections and archives discoverable, searchable and appropriately tagged. A coalition of staff, Fellows and interns working in digital spaces at the Smithsonian Institution, who are either engaged with research using AI or ML tools or working closely with digital data in other ways, came together to discuss the promise and potential perils of applying AI and ML at scale and this work results from those conversations. Here, we present the process that has led to the development of an AI Values Statement and an implementation plan, including the release of datasets with accompanying documentation to enable these data to be used with improved context and reproducibility (dataset cards). We plan to continue releasing dataset cards and for AI and ML applications, model cards, in order to enable informed usage of Smithsonian data and research products.

Mapping European Digital Heritage Politics: An Empirical Study of Europeana as a Web-based Network

ABSTRACT Europeana is a cultural heritage initiative financed by the European Union (EU) with the primary scope of curating a platform aggregating digital collections of European cultural heritage. Among other tasks, Europeana designs best practices and digital tools aligned with the EU’s digital cultural policy to support the digitization of cultural heritage institutions in the member states. Therefore, it can be considered a socio-political actor building an international network. Nevertheless, it has mainly been studied as a digital service. To investigate Europeana’s impact on the European cultural sector, this work proposes a three-level methodology combining web mapping, close reading of websites, and statistical analysis. This methodology offers a comprehensive picture of the Europeana platform’s role on the web, providing evidence of its action as a social hub gathering a network of national and local actors in the European cultural environment.

Wikidata for authority control: sharing museum knowledge with the world

The development of Wikidata as the web’s central authority hub has created new opportunities for cultural heritage institutions wishing to make their data more visible, accessible and relevant. This paper introduces the project Usable Authorities for Data-driven Cultural Heritage Research, in which the Nationalmuseum and the National Historical Museums, in partnership with Wikimedia Sverige, explore this new area.
 The aim of our project is to develop and evaluate methods of linking museum authority data to Wikidata, with the ultimate goal of making it easier for researchers and other users to find, understand and analyze relevant information distributed across different museum collections. The project includes visualizations of relations between historical persons and places to show the potential of otherwise abstract large amounts of data. Another aim is to increase the knowledge about Wikidata and its possibilities among cultural heritage institutions in Sweden, encouraging them to use the data and resources accumulated on the Wikimedia platforms, as well as to actively contribute to them themselves.
 The project has proven to be an innovative case study on what is required from a cultural heritage institution to make their data more open and shareable. The focus is on cleaning up the authority data in the museums’ databases, including correcting errors and deleting duplicates. The data is there aligned with Wikidata using OpenRefine, so that relevant Wikidata items can be updated with the museums’ identifiers. Later on, by developing attractive visualizations, the data is brought to life, highlighting how much information Wikidata volunteers have contributed with and how it complements the museums’ own knowledge bases. The visualizations showcase how Wikidata, by being heavily structured and machine-readable, enables the development of new applications that bring the data closer to the users.

A Guided Tour Study of the Untidy but Inspirational PIM of Visual Artists

ABSTRACTWhile all individuals deal with increasingly large amounts of digital information in their everyday lives and professionally, prior works suggest visual artists have unique information management practices and challenges. This study therefore examined the personal information management (PIM) practices and challenges of six practising visual artists using guided tours and short interviews. It was found that the visual artists had some unique practices connected to their strong emphasis on serendipity, inspiration, and visual dimensions of information. Like non‐artists, the participants faced challenges across all phases of PIM, chiefly an excess of information and fragmented organisation, and they found it especially hard to assess how personal and valuable their information could be. After characterising this rarely discussed PIM demographic, we draw on the findings to provide concrete recommendations for artists doing PIM, for information and cultural heritage institutions, and for designers of PIM software.