Cultural Heritage Organizations Research Articles

The Deaf Heritage Collective: Collaboration with Critical Intent

Abstract The paper reflects upon the Deaf Heritage Collective, a collaborative project led by Edinburgh Napier University’s Design for Heritage team and Heriot Watt’s Centre for Translation And Interpreting Studies. The project aimed to advance discussion around the British Sign Language Act (Scottish Government 2015) and bring into being a network of Deaf communities and cultural heritage organisations committed to promoting BSL in public life. The aim of this paper is to contextualise the project and its creative approach within the distinctly Scottish context, and the ideals of critical heritage, critical design and the museum activist movement. This paper presents the context and creative processes by which we engaged participants in debate and the struggles we encountered. We describe these processes and the primacy of collaborative making as a mode of inquiry. We argue that by curating a workshop space where different types of knowledge were valorised and where participants were encouraged to “think with” materials (Rockwell and Mactavish 2004) we were able to challenge the balance of power between heritage professionals and members of the Deaf community. By harnessing the explanatory power of collaborative making we debated the assemblages of epistemic inequality, and the imagined futures of Deaf heritage in Scotland.

Museums Without Walls

The purpose of this paper is to explore the possibilities of virtual exhibitions (VEs) for GLAM institutions. While VEs continue to be secondary to physical exhibitions, an effective VE uses technology to engage viewers and present opportunities for interactivity to support further learning and discovery of collection materials. Cultural heritage organizations can use VEs to make the “digital version of a cultural artefact accessible even when the physical access is restricted” and leads GLAM institutions and LIS scholars to reflect on how “users receive and interact with information in a virtual world” (Caggianese et al., 2018, p.625). With the aid of easily accessible additional information, this modern form of presentation may support a deeper level of understanding than a user can experience by viewing a traditional physical exhibition, and may enhance their overall viewing experience. Despite the excitement and opportunities afforded by VR, exhibitions remain accessible for visitors without VR equipment via browsers or web-page based exhibitions. As the “virtual exhibition is a concept that has acquired new meanings along with the evolution of modern information and communication technologies,” we look forward to seeing how GLAM institutions continue to shape the user experience (Ciurea & Filip, 2016, p.28). Cultural organizations will continue to develop and combine their partnerships, financial and staff resources, content, and visitor interests to build more VE structures that fit both their collections and their community.

Donating money and time to cultural heritage: evidence from the European Union

Citizens can get engaged with cultural heritage in many ways. Among them, donating their money and their time to cultural heritage organizations is a mode of participation that has been studied on very few occasions. Using the evidence contained in the Special Eurobarometer 466 (2017), we analyse the individual decision of donating money or time to support heritage organizations in the 28 countries of the European Union. We estimate a bivariate probit model to investigate how individual characteristics correlate with the decision to donate money and/or time to sustain cultural heritage.

The Role of Social Marketing in Sports Tourism Development in Tehran Province

Purpose: The goal of this study was to investigate the role of social marketing in the development of sports tourism in Tehran Province.Methodology: The study is applied in terms of purpose, and it is a descriptive correlational research in which 100 experts in the field of social marketing (professors of marketing), specialists in sports tourism (professors), authorities in sports tourism (professors and researchers of this field), as well as managers and experts of Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization were selected as the sample using available and selective sampling. The data collection tool was a researcher-made questionnaire taken from previous studies. The professors confirmed the face and content validity, with reliability confirmed by Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.99.Findings: Data were analyzed by SPSS21 and LISREL 8 software. The results showed seven components of social marketing. They include technology, government laws and policies, environment, economic status, safety and security in sports venues, use of ads and communication channels, all but the last item have a positive and significant effect on the development of sports tourism.Originality: The results of this study showed that the investment of tourism organizations in social marketing factors is effective. The present study is one of the few comprehensive studies that have been conducted on credit and infrastructure investments in Iran concerning sports tourism.

Evaluating the role of the National Museum of Iran in the development of cultural tourism

In addition to acquainting the public with the culture of a particular region, cultural tourism creates economic opportunities. Taking into account various tourist sites, museums are definitely among the most important ones. In Iran, the National Museum is one of the most important museums because of its rich collection of historical monuments related to the ancient Persia and Islamic periods. The authors of this article analyse the role of the National Museum of Iran in the development of the country’s cultural tourism. The analysis is based on information obtained from the database of the Iranian Cultural Heritage Organization and the National Museum of Iran. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling were employed for data analysis. The results confirm the importance of the National Museum of Iran in the development of cultural tourism.

De travers dans la gorge

Antoine Gauthier's contribution for the COVID-19 Special Issue. 
 Contribution d'Antoine Gauthier pour le numéro spécial de COVID-19.

Digital Cultural Heritage Design Practice: A Conceptual Framework

Human-Centred Design approaches in museums give rise to a new, digital cultural heritage design practice by refocusing design from the (digital) technology on to the (digitally-enhanced) visitor experience and requiring involvement in design from both designers and non-designers. This practice is foregrounded as central within a wider landscape of transformative museum design and innovation. The paper calls for a new research agenda that takes design practice as the unit of analysis and recognizes the uniqueness of each cultural heritage organization and its capacity to deploy digital media and technologies successfully in its own unique ways and as a matter of organizational fit. We outline this agenda through a conceptual framework for the analysis of digital cultural heritage design practice along the dimensions of activity, tool mediation, and knowledge production. The framework acknowledges that the design of digitally-enhanced visitor experiences is catalytically mediated by tools and constitutes powerful ways of knowing-in-designing.

Editorial for Special Issue “Virtual Reality and Its Application in Cultural Heritage”

Recent advancements in Virtual Reality (VR) technologies provide new opportunities for Cultural Heritage (CH) organizations to attract, engage, and support end-users more efficiently and effectively [...]

The Impact on Older People’s Wellbeing of Leaving Heritage Volunteering and the Challenges of Managing this Process

The benefits of volunteering for older volunteers and for the organisations who host them is well-documented. The impact of being obliged to leave volunteering due to age-related conditions, and any challenges that this creates for volunteer managers, are under-researched. This study explored how volunteers and volunteer managers experienced this point in the volunteering lifecycle and whether the topic warranted further research. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with fourteen older people, who were (or had been) volunteers at one of three cultural heritage organisations in the north-east of England alongside seven volunteer managers from those organisations. These represented the diversity of heritage organisations in the region. Volunteers discussed leaving volunteering in terms of loss but also indicated that forms of personal appraisal and agency were possible, ameliorating the impact of leaving. Volunteer managers discussed how organisational frameworks and the relationships they formed with volunteers shaped their practices. These relationships created a sense of organisational reciprocity which led some managers to exceed the rules in order to sustain people in their volunteering. The results suggest that supporting personal agency could ameliorate the impact of leaving volunteering but that organisations would benefit from articulating the extent and the limits of that support.

Reforming Housing Policies for the Sustainability of Historic Cities in the Post-COVID Time: Insights from the Atlas World Heritage

In recent years, finding affordable housing has been a notable challenge for the residents of historic cities in Europe. This paper aims to develop a novel vision for improving housing policies in the post-COVID time to moderate the long-lasting issue of affordable housing in historic cities. The research was developed based on the findings of the Atlas World Heritage in 2019. In this project, five European Art Cities, namely Florence, Edinburgh, Bordeaux, Porto, and Santiago de Compostela, discussed their common management challenges through the shared learning method. Focusing on the case study of Florence and using a mixed-method, we collected data through the municipality of Florence, map analysis, and distribution of a questionnaire among the city residents. Then, we used inductive reasoning to explain how reforming housing policies in the post-COVID time could moderate the long-lasting issue of affordable housing in historic cities. The findings suggest that housing policies need to be supported simultaneously at both international and local levels. From the international perspective, associated cultural heritage organizations, like United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and its advisory bodies and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), need to develop restriction policies that manage tourism flows in historic cities like increasing the airline taxation. At the local level, Florence needs decisive housing policies that ban the growth of illegal tourist accommodation in the city. However, the privilege of establishing new hotels can be awarded in suburban or rural areas to support sustainable tourism goals.

Building Digital Libraries: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians, 2nd ed. By Kyle Banerjee and Terry Reese Jr. [Review

The second edition of Building Digital Libraries: A How-To-Do-It Manual for Librarians was created to address the expanding volume of digital content available to users in many forms and the increasing role that digital repositories within libraries and cultural heritage organizations play in storing, preserving, and making accessible that content. This expanding role for many types of traditional information repositories will help ensure their long-term success as digital content management becomes part of their identities.

NFDI4Culture - Consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage

Digital data on tangible and intangible cultural assets is an essential part of daily life, communication and experience. It has a lasting influence on the perception of cultural identity as well as on the interactions between research, the cultural economy and society. Throughout the last three decades, many cultural heritage institutions have contributed a wealth of digital representations of cultural assets (2D digital reproductions of paintings, sheet music, 3D digital models of sculptures, monuments, rooms, buildings), audio-visual data (music, film, stage performances), and procedural research data such as encoding and annotation formats. The long-term preservation and FAIR availability of research data from the cultural heritage domain is fundamentally important, not only for future academic success in the humanities but also for the cultural identity of individuals and society as a whole. Up to now, no coordinated effort for professional research data management on a national level exists in Germany. NFDI4Culture aims to fill this gap and create a user-centered, research-driven infrastructure that will cover a broad range of research domains from musicology, art history and architecture to performance, theatre, film, and media studies. The research landscape addressed by the consortium is characterized by strong institutional differentiation. Research units in the consortium's community of interest comprise university institutes, art colleges, academies, galleries, libraries, archives and museums. This diverse landscape is also characterized by an abundance of research objects, methodologies and a great potential for data-driven research. In a unique effort carried out by the applicant and co-applicants of this proposal and ten academic societies, this community is interconnected for the first time through a federated approach that is ideally suited to the needs of the participating researchers. To promote collaboration within the NFDI, to share knowledge and technology and to provide extensive support for its users have been the guiding principles of the consortium from the beginning and will be at the heart of all workflows and decision-making processes. Thanks to these principles, NFDI4Culture has gathered strong support ranging from individual researchers to high-level cultural heritage organizations such as the UNESCO, the International Council of Museums, the Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia. On this basis, NFDI4Culture will take innovative measures that promote a cultural change towards a more reflective and sustainable handling of research data and at the same time boost qualification and professionalization in data-driven research in the domain of cultural heritage. This will create a long-lasting impact on science, cultural economy and society as a whole.

Iran Linguistic Atlas Project (ILA): Past and Present

Iran Linguistic Atlas (ILA), funded by the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage and Tourism (RICHT), is a research project for mapping the linguistic diversity of Iran. The project is aimed at recording unified and comparable data from every spoken dialect of Iran’s rural areas and producing self-organized colored maps of this diversity using a specialized software program. Its initial phase began around the mid-1970s in the form of a joint project by the then Iranian Academy of Language and the National Geography Organization. In 2001, the documented data was handed over to the Cultural Heritage Organization, to be saved and expanded. The Iran Linguistic Atlas has now been redefined as an automatic linguistic atlas with the capability of producing self-organizing colored maps according to the operator’s choices. In this article, the ILA, its background and the state of its current phase is introduced. The nature of its data, its earlier and recent field methods, its audiotapes, digital databases and computer databases of phonetic transcriptions are described. In addition, ILA software program is presented and its capability for creating automatic colored maps is discussed thoroughly.

Heritage in lockdown: digital provision of memory institutions in the UK and US of America during the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT As the impact of COVID-19 emerged in early 2020 and physical movement was restricted as a public health measure, digital media consumption behaviour changed dramatically. The accelerated move to online consumption increased the urgency for memory institutions such as museums to introduce new ways to digitally experience cultural collections. This research aimed to understand how memory institutions adapted during COVID-19 lockdowns by surveying the existing and novel digital resources that enabled access to cultural heritage organizations. The research was conducted during the UK lockdown period (April–July 2020) when we collected and analysed data from 83 heritage institutions in the UK and in the USA regarding the number, type, format, intended audience and intended aims of digital engagement opportunities they offered. The analysis evidences how different types of memory institutions responded to social need during the lockdown by supporting online visitors with resources such as educational material, live events and creative activities, and highlights where museums have acted effectively and where changed approaches are indicated.

Global successful experiences of the health tourism brand and presentation of a native model

The current study aims to benchmark the global successful experiences of health tourism branding and presenting its native pattern. This study is analytical-descriptive in nature and practical approach in terms of the target sought. The questionnaire was designed to measure the effective variables on health tourism branding. A researcher-made questionnaire, whose dimensions and indicators were based on the literature and research background, was used to measure the dependent variable of the research. Acer brand value questionnaire was used for assessing the dependent variable of the research. The statistical population of this research is the professors of the medical sciences universities and tourism and marketing management group and the directors and assistants of the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization of Fars and Bushehr provinces that regarding the lack of access to all members of the research community, sampling was done by available sampling. Finally, 87 valid questionnaires were obtained. After examining the research model using the path analysis method, the findings showed that all paths between the research variables were confirmed at 95% confidence level and were significant. This means that policy making, infrastructure, marketing, communication and information, medicine and health have a positive and significant impact on health tourism branding. However, the findings indicated that the highest path coefficient for the relationship between the infrastructure and branding of health tourism is 0.365.

Disrupting the library: Digital scholarship and Big Data at the National Library of Scotland

With a mass digitisation programme underway and the addition of non-print legal deposit and web archive collections, the National Library of Scotland is now both producing and collecting data at an unprecedented rate, with over 5PB of storage in the Library’s data centres. As well as the opportunities to support large scale analysis of the collections, this also presents new challenges around data management, storage, rights, formats, skills and access. Furthermore, by assuming the role of both creators and collectors, libraries face broader questions about the concepts of ‘collections' and ‘heritage', and the ethical implications of collecting practices. While the ‘collections as data’ movement has encouraged cultural heritage organisations to present collections in machine-readable formats, new services, processes and tools also need to be established to enable these emerging forms of research, and new modes of working need to be established to take into account an increasing need for transparency around the creation and presentation of digital collections. This commentary explores the National Library of Scotland's new digital scholarship service, the implications of this new activity and the obstacles that libraries encounter when navigating a world of Big Data.

Towards Automated Digital Preservation through Preservation Action Registries

Since the 1960s, digital preservation has transformed from a secondary activity at a select few cultural heritage organizations to a vital international effort with its own best practices, standards, and community. This keynote presentation and paper presents an overview of the changing scope of digital preservation, issues, and strategies for digital preservation in the cultural heritage community.

The Ever-Changing Work That is Digital Preservation

Since the 1960s, digital preservation has transformed from a secondary activity at a select few cultural heritage organizations to a vital international effort with its own best practices, standards, and community. This keynote presentation and paper presents an overview of the changing scope of digital preservation, issues, and strategies for digital preservation in the cultural heritage community.

Big Data Analytics for Search Engine Optimization

In the Big Data era, search engine optimization deals with the encapsulation of datasets that are related to website performance in terms of architecture, content curation, and user behavior, with the purpose to convert them into actionable insights and improve visibility and findability on the Web. In this respect, big data analytics expands the opportunities for developing new methodological frameworks that are composed of valid, reliable, and consistent analytics that are practically useful to develop well-informed strategies for organic traffic optimization. In this paper, a novel methodology is implemented in order to increase organic search engine visits based on the impact of multiple SEO factors. In order to achieve this purpose, the authors examined 171 cultural heritage websites and their retrieved data analytics about their performance and user experience inside them. Massive amounts of Web-based collections are included and presented by cultural heritage organizations through their websites. Subsequently, users interact with these collections, producing behavioral analytics in a variety of different data types that come from multiple devices, with high velocity, in large volumes. Nevertheless, prior research efforts indicate that these massive cultural collections are difficult to browse while expressing low visibility and findability in the semantic Web era. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes the computational development of a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that utilizes the generated big cultural data analytics and improves the visibility of cultural heritage websites. One step further, the statistical results of the study are integrated into a predictive model that is composed of two stages. First, a fuzzy cognitive mapping process is generated as an aggregated macro-level descriptive model. Secondly, a micro-level data-driven agent-based model follows up. The purpose of the model is to predict the most effective combinations of factors that achieve enhanced visibility and organic traffic on cultural heritage organizations’ websites. To this end, the study contributes to the knowledge expansion of researchers and practitioners in the big cultural analytics sector with the purpose to implement potential strategies for greater visibility and findability of cultural collections on the Web.

A web repository for geo-located 3D digital cultural heritage models

Recent advances in 3D surveying and web technologies have made a significant contribution to the digital conservation and dissemination of cultural heritage. 3D cultural heritage models are now a critical component in the cultural heritage conservation, which are also employed for other use cases in education, research, tourism, virtual and augmented reality. The World Wide Web is used as a primary medium for dissemination of 3D cultural heritage models, while databases including databases of web repositories for long-term archiving. This article aims to report a new methodology and a web repository to integrate maps, 3D models, and geospatial data such as geolocation. It can, therefore, be utilized for long-term archiving and visualization of geo-located 3D digital cultural heritage models on the Web. Unlike many previous related projects which developed the web repositories from the ground up, the web repository built using this methodology is based on free and open-source, easy-to-implement content management system namely KeystoneJS and other associated frameworks, which are reusable and completely extendable. It can, thereby, help cultural heritage organizations and cultural heritage professionals facilitate the rapid development of web repositories for geo-located 3D digital cultural heritage models, which can also be further extended per project requirements. While this methodology is presented for the cultural heritage domain in mind, in the long term it can be employed and extended for use in a wide range of domains such as archaeology, engineering, and geographic information systems (GIS) among others.