Cultural Heritage Organizations Research Articles

Internet of things in the archives: novel tools for environmental monitoring of archival collections

Purpose Cultural heritage archives rely on environmental monitoring devices, such as dataloggers or more complex networked systems, to ensure collection preservation through collecting temperature, humidity, light and/or air quality measures. Existing systems are often costly, inflexible and do not use a modern, internet of things (IoT) approach. This paper aims to determine the suitability of currently popular general-purpose IoT devices, standards and technologies to the environmental monitoring needs of archivists, as well as identify any challenges. Design/methodology/approach This paper describes an exploratory study detailing the design, construction and usability testing of a do-it-yourself datalogger and data dashboard system, which seeks to manage previously identified trade-offs in cost, required technical skill and maintainability. Findings The environmental monitoring system presented met archivists’ needs well and was generally noted to be easy-to-use, efficient and an improvement on existing systems. This suggests that an IoT approach can support archivists’ needs in this area. Research limitations/implications Potential limitations of this study include lack of archival staff with sufficient technical training to maintain such a system and the rapid pace of IoT evolution yielding unstable and constantly changing technologies. Practical implications The system design presented in this work provides a blueprint for cultural heritage organizations desiring a fuller-featured, lower cost environmental monitoring system for archival collections. Originality/value This research takes a novel user-centered, open-source, IoT approach to construct an environmental monitoring system that is designed directly from archivists’ requirements and is extensible for future needs.

Adding Culture to UX

For more than a decade, User eXperience (UX) has grown into a core concept of Human--Computer Interaction (HCI) and has been widely disseminated and accepted in the HCI community. At the same time, Cultural Heritage (CH) has been a favored domain for UX research, while the visitor is able to exploit CH material before, during, and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. Thus, CH organisations need to carefully explore the potential of investing in UX, as visitor satisfaction and intention to return and spread positive word-of-mouth is closely linked to the destination's overall success. A multitude of methods for UX analysis exist, but a clear overview of the current state of the available UX research methods in CH is missing. Recent studies [Othman 2012; Roussou 2018] have successfully developed frameworks to measure UX in cultural spaces, but most of them still lack understanding about how visitors interact with new technologies and simultaneously with the exhibits. In this article, a survey that describes the conceptual frameworks, models, research methodologies, and paradigms of incorporating Cultural User eXperience (CUX) in applications is reported, as well as the overall interaction between UX and CH and the related aspects that are influenced by the CH application domain and the parameters leading to optimization of the CUX. The outcome of this survey lays ground for understanding and defining the concept of UX research in CH, while current challenges and issues for future work are discussed.

Cultural Memories for Better Place Experience: The Case of Orabi Square in Alexandria, Egypt

Globalization is associated with significant transformations in city forms and cultural and social performances. Governments and cultural heritage organisations increasingly appreciate the importance of preserving diverse physical cultural heritage through rehabilitation and the implementation of conservation plans. Nevertheless, there is a need to evaluate whether these plans understand the importance of cultural memory in societies, as well as how it affects the human psyche. Utilizing Orabi Square, which is one of the richest Historic Urban Landscapes (HUL) in the metropolitan city of Alexandria in Egypt, this study aims to answer the question; to what extent does Historic Urban Landscape (HUL) management present a situation that maintains cultural memory and achieve psychosocial well-being? The research explored the site’s old and new conditions and place experience, applying a qualitative approach through onsite face-to-face semi-structured interviews combined with data from a Facebook group—Alexandria’s Spirit. The QSR Nvivo12 analysis program was used for the data interpretation and for charting the intangible values accompanying cultural memory such as emotions and behaviour. The study indicated that cultural memory is an affective catalyst for emotional attachment to place and is an important factor informing sense of place. Based on our study, inclusion of cultural memories should be an integral element in the future management plans of Orabi Square to enhance place experience and psychosocial well-being.

Research Data Management in a Cultural Heritage Organisation

Research is a core function of cultural heritage organisations. Inevitably, the undertaking of research by galleries, libraries, archives and museums (the GLAM sector) leads to the creation of vast quantities of research data. Yet despite growing recognition that research data must be managed if it is to be exploited effectively, and in spite of increasing understanding of research data management practices and needs, particularly in the higher education sector, knowledge of research data management in cultural heritage organisations remains extremely limited. This paper represents an attempt to address the limited awareness of research data management in the cultural heritage sector. It presents the results of a data management audit conducted at Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) in 2018. The study reveals that research data management at HRP is underdeveloped, while highlighting some causes for optimism. The results of the study are compared to the results of similar studies conducted in UK higher education institutions (HEIs), highlighting the many discrepancies in the ways that research data is managed at HRP and in the HE sector. Recognition of these differences and similarities, it is argued, is necessary for the development of better research data management practices and tools for the heritage sector.

Partnering through Collections in Digital Humanities: Looking at Researchers’ Needs

Recent years have seen cultural heritage organizations undergo a cultural shift as part of an agenda with an increased focus on digital innovation and audience engagement. Opening up collections through digitization and making them accessible to scholars, students, and the general public has been a strategic priority for many institutions. Alongside the technological advances of the past decades, the proliferation of various types of digital information objects has brought large changes to traditional scholarship in the Arts & Humanities. The emergence of Digital Humanities has been a result of the possibilities offered by the digital age, while the characteristics of the field reflect the shifting nature and role of scholarship in a modern society. More specifically, interdisciplinarity, openness, and collaboration are some of the core characteristics of scholarship in the field that make it distinct from scholarly practice in more traditional Arts & Humanities areas.[1] Moreover, as part of the nature of Digital Humanities work, scholars create, use, and communicate various types of digital data in previously unimaginable ways.

“Keep Portland Weird”?

The Portland Book Festival, originally known as “Wordstock,” is the main annual literary event in Portland, Oregon. It is also an increasingly prominent literary festival in the United States. The branding shift from “Wordstock” to “Portland Book Festival” in 2018 unearths key tensions, hierarchies, subversions, and cultural changes in the communicative and social functions of the Festival. The essay identifiestransactionalandtransformativeaspects of the Festival. Bank of America’s festival-naming “title” sponsorship, the partnership of cultural heritage organizations, and Portland place branding offertransactionalstability for the Festival, where parties give and get in kind. The Festival’s temporary affective bonds and their social media documentation facilitatetransformationalexperiences that reinscribe hierarchies of centre/periphery. The name change fosters a more democratic and accessible festival experience. This article takes a multimethod approach, triangulating sentiment analysis of tweets from the 2017 and 2018 Festivals, a survey of 2018 Portland Book Festival attendees, and interviews with prominent stakeholders in the Festival rebranding.

Empirical Research on Web Harvesting in the Process of Text and Data Mining in National Libraries of EU Member States

Almost two decades of experience on web harvesting and archiving are counted; the subject of web harvesting and web archiving have been top in the interest of researchers, technologists and librarians-information scientists. Web harvesting projects and pilot programs on archiving content traced on the Web are becoming priorities for national libraries and cultural heritage organizations in the EU. This paper pertains to web harvesting as a process for data mining from web and only through web (“pull” function); this paper elaborates upon research implemented in the framework of the funded research project titled “Web Archiving in Public Libraries and IP Law” that focused on the processes of web-harvesting and archiving as well as Text and Data Mining (TDM) operations in the national libraries of EU Member States. Web archiving as an official operation in national libraries of EU Member States creates web collections and preserves them for the purpose of being accessible and usable in perpetuity. This paper pertains to research on various components of web harvesting and archiving through an online survey (qualitative research) which targeted the national libraries of EU Member States. The research team of authors posed seventeen questions to EU national libraries. The survey output comes from answers delivered by 22 national libraries of EU Member States. The questionnaire was created through the use of Google forms. The researchers reached the EU national libraries via email and follow up telephone calls seeking libraries’ participation in the research. The aim of the research was to delve on participant libraries’ Text and Data Mining operation leveraging on Web harvesting and Web archiving technologies and operations. Results analysis reveals that web harvesting is considered among national libraries’ top priorities; the relevant projects increase in number, the web collections become more and more and the technological infrastructures and tools for web harvesting improve. Yet, there are many issues that remain unresolved. A significant number of surveyed libraries consider that legal and technical issues remain the most important to resolve. Access to harvested material is still under legal restrictions. The Directive 2019/790/EU on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) creates a favorable legal foundation for the deployment of web harvesting operations in national libraries of the EU Member States. TDM technologies make possible new areas of research. Web harvesting that was initially aimed for preservation purposes now expands to unprecedented research of national heritage through state-of-the-art automated TDM processes.

Examining the state of the art of audience development in museums and heritage organisations: a Systematic Literature review

ABSTRACT A series of transformations in the social and political roles as well as in the economic contexts of cultural heritage organisations over the past decades have brought into focus the need for them to work on their relationship with audiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore the current academic debate on the audience development in museums and other cultural heritage organisations, with the aim of identifying the main thematic areas within this field of knowledge. A Systematic Literature Review has been conducted by using the Web of Science, Scopus and Dialnet databases. The following nine categories emerged from the analysis: Management Strategies, Community Engagement, Participation, Knowing the Audience, Communication, Marketing, Education, Skills and Abilities, and Digital and Technological Environments. Future research lines could further the existing knowledge of each of the identified categories, include additional languages and databases, and explore the sources and documents produced by cultural practitioners.

Digital Cultural Heritage and Wikimedia Commons Licenses:

Cultural heritage institutions can contribute to public knowledge and increase awareness of their collections by uploading digital objects to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation projects. However, prior research has established the difficulty of and/or hesitation by many cultural heritage institutions in clearly and accurately labeling the copyright status of their born-digital and digitized collections. With this knowledge, how likely is it that digital cultural heritage will be findable and usable on Wikimedia Commons? This study seeks to determine how accurate rights statements for cultural heritage objects on Wikimedia Commons are, and whether inaccuracies can be linked to problematic rights statements in cultural heritage digital libraries or whether the inaccuracies stem from Wikimedia Commons. By evaluating the rights statements, licenses, and sources for 308 Wikimedia Commons objects from 57 cultural heritage organizations and comparing that information to corresponding licenses from digital libraries, we can begin to develop best practices and educational needs for digital librarians, archives, museum curators, and Wikipedians alike to improve the user experience for those using digital cultural heritage on Wikimedia projects.

The efficiency of visual buffer zone to preserve historical open spaces in Iran

Neglecting visual consideration in determining regulations related to height and skyline in urban plans in the area around historical sites has caused irreparable damages to authenticity of historical open spaces. Despite all existing agreements and regulations related to cultural heritage, there is a significant gap between regulations and what is implemented in the real world. It is even more challenging in the context of dynamic and heterogeneous metropolitan cities with historical backgrounds. So, the present study was conducted to develop an effective and applicable 3D-model for visual buffer conservation and height regulation in development of urban planning in the area beyond approved regulations of historical sites; with an emphasis in two historical sites in Iran, that is, “Zandieh Complex”, and “Hafezieh Tomb” in Shiraz with a high risk of making scratched skyline. In this study, it was attempted to decompose existing approaches to visual analysis techniques and then providing a technical yet simple enough platform for city decision-makers to be used for defining visual buffer zones with height regulations. The research method is a combination of quantitative (to build 3D evaluation model) and qualitative (to compare and to build a framework) methods. Firstly, range of visual effects was quantified by employing “three-dimensional visual surfaces” using Shiraz municipality data bank and DEM topographic data. Secondly, a comparative analysis was conducted to test correspondence between results and authorized map of “the Cultural Heritage Organization” and “Municipality’s comprehensive plan of Shiraz”. Results of the study suggested that the use of this applicable model can increase public attention to visual and intangible value of historical open spaces. The model will also present a less prone to errors and integrated height managing tool to bring authorities of conflicting interests into transparent conservation. Using suggested methodology will make height pre-assessment faster with minimal cost and expertise.

The (W)Hole Picture: Responses to a Looted Landscape

Abstract:How do archaeologists, governments, law enforcement, and a local non-governmental organization react to a hole in the ground—a hole that is the direct result of archaeological site looting? Whatever the response, the aim is the same: the protection of Jordanian cultural heritage through a curtailing of archaeological looting. New to the standard suite of responses are unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs). A comprehensive approach to the landscape, which includes UAV flyovers, ground truthing, oral interviews, collaborative efforts with the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and local cultural heritage organizations, is essential to safeguarding and documenting what remains of a series of Early Bronze Age sites (3600–2000bc) along the Dead Sea Plain in Jordan. This is an examination of the (w)hole picture—individual and institutional responses to looters’ holes—diverse reactions with the common goal of preserving and protecting Jordanian cultural heritage.

A Note on the Present Situation of Heritage in Iran, Despite the Fact That the Cultural Heritage Organization has been Become a Ministry

Although many years have passed since the Cultural Heritage Organization was established in Iran, its heritage has not been seriously considered by this organization. The Cultural Heritage Organization, and even the government, have focused on the heritage of the Islamic period for political and religious reasons, while prior periods have been less considered or have been completely forgotten.

Power of Place - Heritage Policy at the Start of the New Millennium

ABSTRACTIn 2000 the (then) English Heritage was asked to lead on a review of policies relating to the historic environment in England. Rather than simply draft something in isolation, English Heritage launched a wide-ranging and inclusive engagement process involving the private sector, natural and cultural heritage organisations, faith groups and many others supported by a MORI survey of peoples’ attitudes to the historic environment and the value they placed on it.The resulting document, Power of Place – the future of the historic environment, anticipated many issues that have subsequently become mainstream elements of policy and practice including conservation-led regeneration, tackling heritage at risk, reviewing public parks and publishing regular state of the historic environment reports. Other recommendations still remain challenging in policy terms – including encouraging better maintenance, promoting craft skills, putting heritage at the heart of education, understanding what people value and why, enabling more participation, managing change, making the regulatory system work better and supporting local leaders.This article simply sets out to raise awareness of that initiative, as a contribution to the history of heritage policyin England.

Kani Koter, Iron Age Cemetery From Iranian Kurdistan

ABSTRACT Kani Koter cemetery is located in Iranian Kurdistan, close to Dere Pemeyan (or Persian Dare Panbedan) village, between the ancient sites of Ziwiye and Karafto Cave (Figure 1). In this article, we discuss the material discovered from one of the graves in this cemetery, its chronology, and cultural associations. Unfortunately, tomb robbers plundered this grave, completely ruining the tomb's stratigraphic context. Fortunately, in 2016 the Cultural Heritage Organization of Kurdistan rescued all of the stolen artefacts, and today the collection is stored at the Sanandaj Museum. The grave has yielded a number of elaborately decorated objects that belong nominally to Assyrian, Urartian and Mannaean artistic traditions, with the date for the finds being established by means of comparisons with Assyrian and Urartian artefacts.

Automatizing chromatic quality assessment for cultural heritage image digitization

In the context of digitization of photographs and other documents with graphical value, cultural heritage organizations need to give a guarantee that the stored digital image is a faithful representation of the physical image both at the physical level and the perceptual level. On the physical level, image quality can be measured objectively in a simple way by applying certain physical attributes to the image, as well as by measuring how distorting images affects the performance of the attributes. However, on the perceptual level, image quality should correspond to the perception that a human expert would experience when observing the physical image under certain determined and controlled conditions. In this paper we address the problem of image quality assessment (IQA) in the context of cultural heritage digitization by applying machine learning (ML). In particular, we explore the possibility of creating a decision tree that mimics the response of an expert on cultural heritage when observing cultural heritage images.

TUTANKHAMEN’S TWO TOMBS: REPLICA CREATION AND THE PRESERVATION OF OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Abstract. There are two tombs of Tutankhamen both located in Luxor, Egypt: one in the Valley of the Kings, excavated into the Theban bedrock and decorated with wall paintings, dating from 1323 BCE; the other, installed 3 km away, opened in April 2014 and is considered to be an ‘exact facsimile’ of the original tomb. Tutankhamen’s tomb is just one example of a cultural heritage site that has been replicated. This list is steadily growing as replicas are finding renewed favour fuelled by technological advancements in three-dimensional recording, capture and fabrication which has enabled the production of highly accurate replicas in both physical and virtual form. Comparisons drawn between the two tombs of Tutankhamen—the original and the replica—aim to highlight the differing approaches of parallel preservation projects and intends to prompt questions surrounding the commissioning and use of replicas in the cultural heritage field and the growing role that 3D digital technology is playing in the preservation/conservation sector. Sites and cultural heritage organization are scrambling to be part of the 3D digital revolution. But, has the transition to 3D and the revival in replicas happened too quickly and at the expense of a site’s other conservation needs? Is technology being used in the service of conservation and preservation or is it the other way around? How can those working with heritage balance the benefit of 3D technology with the overall conservation needs for a site? Using the example of Tutankhamen’s two tombs this paper aims to provoke discussion on these topics.

KEYNOTE: USING THE GETTY VOCABULARIES TO CONNECT RESOURCES IN A LINKED AND OPEN WORLD: GROWING POTENTIAL THROUGH CONTRIBUTIONS

Abstract. The J. Paul Getty Trust is a cultural and philanthropic institution dedicated to the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy.Through the collective and individual work of its constituent programs – the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, the J Paul Getty Museum, and the Getty Research Institute – the Getty pursues its mission in Los Angeles and throughout the world, serving both the general interested public and a wide range of professional communities in order to promote a vital civil society through an understanding of the visual arts.The Getty Research Institute is dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts and their various histories through its expertise, active collecting program, public programs, institutional collaborations, exhibitions, publications, digital services, and residential scholars programs. Its Research Library and Special Collections of rare materials and digital resources serve an international community of scholars and the interested public.The Institute's activities and scholarly resources guide and sustain each other and together provide a unique environment for research, critical inquiry, and scholarly exchange.The Getty Vocabularies have been produced and maintained for decades by the Getty Vocabulary Program, which is part of the Getty Research Institute (GRI).They are compliant with ISO and NICO standards for multilingual thesaurus construction and contain terminology and other information about people, places, objects, and art-historical and conservation concepts.They are compiled resources and grow through contributions from various Getty projects and from many external institutions.Although there are now five vocabularies, this talk will concentrate on the three that have been released as Linked Open Data.They are the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)®, the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)®, and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN)®. These three vocabularies were the first to be released because they are used universally in the cultural heritage and library communities and represent best practice.The presentation will show examples of how AAT, TGN and ULAN are used and to highlight reasons why they have become such valuable resources. It will provide an overview of some of the major challenges and lessons learned since the vocabularies were made available as LOD. Topics will range from reconciling external resources with the Getty vocabularies to strategies for cultural heritage organizations to contribute new concepts and terminology and the need to easily and quickly provide contributors with the information they need to insert the link into their collection management systems.The goal is not only to work with the community to help everyone make the best use of the LOD datasets, but to make sure the datasets themselves continue to grow through contributions.

Editorial Note for Special Issue on the Evaluation of Digital Cultural Resources—January 2019

Digital technologies have a significant impact on all areas of operation of cultural heritage organisations, from documenting, interpreting, and exhibiting the collections to communicating and interacting with diverse audience groups. As the cultural heritage sector is gaining substantial experience in communicating collections information in multiple digital forms—whether an online catalogue, virtual exhibition, mobile app, museum interactive, or social media exchange—the focus of both practitioners and researchers working in this area has started shifting to user engagement, which increasingly affects cultural encounters and shapes users’ perception of cultural organisations. Cultural and educational institutions around the world are heavily investing into digitisation and the development and use of various digital tools to make their collections accessible both online and onsite. Yet, we still know relatively little about who uses these digital collections and applications, how they interact with the associated data, how they value these cultural services, and what the impacts of these digital resources are, both on the users and the organisations themselves.

Wikidata: Recruiting the Crowd to Power Access to Digital Archives

The web is the first stop for information seekers. As holders of the world’s cultural artifacts, cultural heritage organizations possess important information about the world throughout history. However, much of this is “locked down” unless information seekers make the effort to visit institutional websites. As a sector, we haven’t yet made our resources and scholarship accessible in the online spaces that knowledge seekers frequent. When Wikipedia launched in 2001, no one could have predicted its place today as the largest and most-used crowd-sourced encyclopedia in the world. As Wikipedia and its sister projects have taken the place as the gateway to the World Wide Web, cultural heritage organizations need to reconcile its place in the online information space. With the emergence of Wikidata, the central storage for structured data of Wikimedia sister projects, in 2012, cultural heritage organizations have the opportunity to “get on the ground floor” of leveraging their data in a free and open repository. This paper will look at how cultural heritage organizations can work with Wikidata, positioning themselves to become a more useful and accessible knowledge resource to the world.

Community Archiving Independent Media

Collections of independent, non-commercial works often represent voices and speak to topics not seen in mainstream media, and they are still often cared for outside of major collecting institutions. Since 2011, activist audiovisual archivists have organized Community Archiving Workshops (CAWs) in the US and beyond to help caretakers of endangered media and film collections jump-start preservation efforts. In the spirit of ‘each one, teach one,’ experienced archivists share skills with other volunteers to inspect and inventory a collection, thus giving caretakers the data they need to select priority works for preservation. CAW organizers are committed to training more people to carry out CAWs in their own communities; a grant-funded project will pilot this approach in partnership with cultural heritage organizations in three regional hubs (Nashville, TN; Madison, WI; and Oakland, CA) beginning in 2018.