Cultural Heritage Professionals Research Articles

Co-Designing the User Experience of Location-Based Games for a Network of Museums: Involving Cultural Heritage Professionals and Local Communities

The design of location-based games (LBGs) for cultural heritage should ensure the active participation and contribution of local communities and heritage professionals to achieve contextual relevance, importance, and content validity. This paper presents an approach and methods of the participatory and co-design of LBGs that promote awareness and learning about the intangible cultural heritage of craftsmanship and artisanal technology throughout a long-term project from sensitization to implementation. Following the design thinking process, we outline the participatory methods (and reflect on results and lessons learnt) of involving cultural heritage professionals, local communities, and visitors (users) of museums and cultural settlements, mainly: field visits, design workshops, field playtesting, and field studies. We discuss issues of participatory design that we experienced throughout the project such as participant centrality and representativeness, producing tangible output from meetings, co-creation of content via playtesting, and implications from the pandemic. This work contributes a case of participatory and co-design of LBGs for cultural heritage that is characterized by longevity and engagement throughout the design process for three LBGs of a museum network in different cultural sites.

Using cultural heritage and historical analyses for current and future problems with too much or too little water

The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, as part of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, executes a program on water and heritage. The program aims to provide information that can be of use in spatial planning by civil services. The underlying principle of the program is the premise that archaeologists and other cultural heritage professionals have the knowledge and means to make cross-overs between heritage and climate change and issues related to this, such as flooding and drought. The program consists of numerous projects, such as cultural heritage research as a knowledge base for predicting the location of water related problems in cities and researching the relation between soil, subsoil and water systems and the location and development of cities. This article digs deeper into the concept of using past data for present issues. It provides examples of how archaeological data and historical analysis can be used for current and future water-management problems.

The Art of Digital Curation

Artists have long engaged with digital and networked technologies in critical and creative ways to explore both new art forms and novel ways of disseminating artworks. Net-based artworks are often created with the intent to circulate outside traditional institutional spaces, and many are shared via artist-run platforms that involve curatorial practices distinct from those of museums or commercial galleries. This article focuses on a particular artist-run platform called Paper-Thin, characterizing the activities involved in managing the platform as digital curation in a polysemous sense – as both the curation of digital artworks and the stewardship of digital information in a complex technological ecosystem. While scholars and cultural heritage professionals have developed innovative preservation strategies for digital and new media artworks housed in institutional collections, the ongoing care of artworks shared through networked alternative spaces is largely carried out co-operatively by the artists and curators of these platforms. Drawing on Howard Becker’s sociological theory of art worlds as networks of co-operative actors, this article describes the patterns of co-operative work involved in creating, exhibiting, and then caring for Net-based art. The article outlines the importance, for cultural heritage professionals, of understanding the digital-curation practices of artists, as these artist-run networked platforms demonstrate emergent approaches to the stewardship of digital culture that move beyond a custodial paradigm.

Reflections on the collaborative conservation of a basket from the Barona Cultural Center & Museum as part of the UCLA/Getty Graduate Program

In this article the author details and reflects on her experience working with a Native cultural item and community stakeholders during graduate coursework at the UCLA/Getty Program. In the subject Conservation and Ethnography, collaboration with members of the Kumeyaay community informed the treatment of a southern California basket from the Barona Cultural Center & Museum. This subject provided a model for collaborative work that the author plans to draw upon in her career, with the experience reinforcing her understanding of her role as one of several caretakers an item has had and will have. Conservators should expect that many others, including Native peoples, makers, as well as cultural heritage professionals, will interact with collection items in diverse ways and that conservation decisions should facilitate this dynamic reality as part of an item’s continuing life history.

Information needs on research data creation

Researchers’ data related information needs are growing. This paper reports the findings of a study with archaeologists and cultural heritage professionals focussing on data reuse related meta-information needs.Methods. Interviews with (N=)10 archaeologists and cultural heritage professionals. Qualitative coding and content analysis. Four types of paradata needs (data on processes, e.g. data creation) are identified, including 1) scope, 2) provenance, 3) methods and 4) knowledge organisation and representation paradata. Knowledge organisation and representation paradata has been least explored both in research and practises so far. The findings point to a need to develop the understanding of the needs and means of documentation of knowledge organisation and representation. The findings contribute to the data literacy of researchers producing and using data descriptions, and to the study of how paradata can be created and used. Further, the findings indicate that distance-to-data is a significant parameter in determining whether information needs are continuous or discrete. Further, the most likely type of reuse should guide the level and type of paradata. Finally, the findings underline that in spite of the comprehensiveness of available meta-information, it will be incomplete. Complementary means — including collaboration with data creators and meta-information extraction approaches — are needed to increase information reusability.

Joint and Combined Exercises in Heritage Protection as a Means to Establish Interfaces in Cooperation with Emergency Responders

abstract: For the successful protection of cultural heritage in times of crisis, cooperation between heritage professionals and emergency responders is necessary. Both sides, however, need to be better versed in cooperating, as there is typically minimal overlap in these professional fields. This article examines the use of tabletop and live exercises in educating cultural heritage professionals, empowering them to successfully cooperate with emergency responders that might be called upon for assistance in protecting cultural heritage in emergencies. Three exercises developed for that aim are presented and discussed. The focus of the exercises lays in establishing interfaces for successful future cooperation. In light of this training goal, the primary audience for these endeavors was heritage professionals, with knowledge creation centered on staff work procedures and decision-making processes—i.e., identifying the right way to communicate necessary expertise to the right person at the right time.

Come hell or high water: climate action by archives, records and cultural heritage professionals in the United Kingdom

PurposeThis paper aims to evidence the perspectives of information professionals in the UK in relation to environmental sustainability and climate action to catalyse collaborative action.Design/methodology/approachThis study takes an interpretivist stance. Research into archive and record management literature was conducted to establish key themes on climate change within the information sector. These themes informed research questions included in a survey cascaded to UK archivists, conservators, records managers and cultural heritage professionals via national mailing lists. The results were then codified and analysed. The study had research ethics and data protection approval from University College London.FindingsUsing professional ethics as a framework, this paper argues that climate action can protect records from the impact of climate change, ensuring future access. The information professionals surveyed were motivated by duties to preservation and access to mitigate the impact of the information sector on the environment. However, sector-specific climate action, such as introducing passive storage conditions or decreasing collection sizes, is limited by insufficient resources, organisational hierarchies and cultures, sector support and a perceived conflict with the duty to preservation.Originality/valueTo date, there is a growing body of literature from other countries on archival practices and the natural environment. However, the UK in general and the records management sector in particular, have not yet fully engaged in the discussion. This study reviews these knowledge gaps for the UK information sector to appropriately respond to climate change.

Social marketing for museums: an introduction to social marketing for the arts and culture sector

Purpose The paper aims to introduce social marketing (SM) as a tool to overcome the low cultural participation, a problem of the arts and culture sector that has worsened in the post-pandemic scenario. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a multidisciplinary literature review (SM, museum marketing, museology and cultural policy) to address the problem of museums and other cultural heritage institutions, at both the macro-level (prevailing cultural policies and antecedents, barriers and consequences to cultural participation) and micro-level (challenges faced by museums in the 21st century and marketing as a management instrument). Findings The downstream, midstream and upstream approaches can be used to design and implement SM interventions intended to address the problem of low cultural participation in museums. The three approaches should be considered holistically, with their synergetic and recursive effects. Research limitations/implications Due to its introductory and conceptual nature, the study provides a comprehensive intervention framework to be used as a platform for future theoretical and empirical research. Further investigations may expand on the specificities of each approach (down, mid and upstream) and extend the framework to other nonprofit cultural institutions beyond museums, such as libraries and archives, cultural heritage sites and theater, music and dance companies. Practical implications The paper proposes a comprehensive SM intervention framework that integrates three interdependent approaches (downstream, midstream and upstream). Originality/value The paper provides a starting point for the holistic application of SM in the arts and culture sector. It also encourages researchers, cultural policymakers and cultural heritage professionals to investigate, design and implement SM programs that better understand, expand and diversify the audience and strengthen the legitimacy and relevance of cultural actors and activities to transform them into inclusive, accessible and sustainable institutions.

Issues in Conservation—Three Value Moments in the Public Perception of Cultural Heritage Objects in Public Spaces

Cultural heritage professionals are becoming increasingly concerned about the lack of care being taken by municipalities for their cultural heritage objects which include works of art in public places. They have therefore begun to ask the public to help take care of “their” cultural heritage through so-called public participation projects. Cultural heritage professionals tacitly assume that if they “teach” the public to treasure such objects of “their” heritage, the public will become more proactive in helping to conserve them. However, research being conducted by the authors is showing that a majority of the general public often has a completely different awareness and/or feeling about cultural heritage objects in their neighborhoods than the cultural heritage professionals think they have, or think they should have. Three recent case studies carried out by the authors show that these differences are most noticeable during so-called “value moments” at the beginning and at the perceived end of an object’s life. These are the two moments when decisions are made, usually by cultural heritage professionals, to place an object in a neighborhood or have it significantly changed or removed, often to the surprise and disagreement of the residents. Between these two moments lay many moments when an object is taken for granted, grudgingly accepted, or not even noticed. Given the fact that cultural heritage professionals often make the ultimate decisions and do not always consider or outright ignore public opinion, it should not be surprising that there is an increasingly negative public perception of what they do. The results of the case studies illustrate the need for professionals to consider and accept as valid, public feelings about cultural heritage objects in their neighborhoods.

Cultivating Digitization Competencies

This article is a case study of how six digitization competencies were developed and disseminated via grant-funded digitization projects at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries Special Collections and Archives. The six competencies are project planning, grant writing, project management, metadata, digital capture, and digital asset management. The authors will introduce each competency, discuss why it is important, and describe how it was developed during the course of the grant project, as well as how it was taught in a workshop environment. The differences in competency development for three different stakeholder groups will be examined: early career grant staff gaining on-the-job experience; experienced digital collections librarians experimenting and innovating; and a statewide audience of cultural heritage professionals attending grant-sponsored workshops.

Historic preservation priorities for climate adaptation

Cultural heritage-specific research is scarce within the climate change literature and climate change policy documents, challenging climate adaptation efforts to minimize adverse impacts on cultural heritage. Engaging and assessing diverse stakeholders' values and integrating those with evidence-based knowledge is critical for timely, effective and transparent preservation and climate adaptation of coastal cultural heritage. This study assessed technical experts' and community groups' opinions about the importance of value-based prioritization considerations to provide more immediate guidance adaptation planning and decision making. The findings from four separate elicitation surveys demonstrated substantial consistency in value-based climate adaptation prioritization preferences for one type of vulnerable cultural heritage: historic buildings in coastal zones in the United States. In particular, the samples of cultural heritage professionals and members of community groups consistently rated spatial importance, uniqueness, and scientific value of historic buildings as very important considerations for climate adaptation prioritization decision-making. Also, consistently evaluated but of relatively low importance were considerations related to the cost of preservation and adaptation treatments, including previous investments. Few statistically significant differences were found among our samples in their perceptions of importance. These findings provide initial guidance to cultural heritage managers, particularly those with scarce financial resources to allocate for adapting coastal historic buildings, and demonstrate the need for continued development of approaches that provide rapid assessment of coastal heritage stakeholders' adaptation priorities.

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.

Copyright Literacy and Copyright Education for Information Professionals

The paper positions the importance of copyright literacy and copyright education for information professionals. Based on a review of scientific literature, the meaning of the term “copyright literacy” is clarified and its characteristics are presented to be used in updating the educational content and methodology of teaching in academic education and continuing professional development training programs. Developing high levels of copyright literacy (knowledge, skills and behaviours) and the ability to implement institutional copyright policy is essential for LIS (Library and Information Science) and cultural heritage professionals. The proposed conclusions in the paper are based on: findings from a multinational survey on copyright literacy of specialists from libraries and other cultural institutions (2013-2015); summary of the activities of the International Copyright Literacy Group (ICLG) in the period 2012-2019; and review of the current documents such as IFLA Statement on Copyright Education and Copyright Literacy (2018) and Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council (2019). Keywords: Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (EU); Copyright literacy; Copyright policy; International Copyright Literacy Group.

A Comparison of Immersive Realities and Interaction Methods: Cultural Learning in Virtual Heritage.

In recent years, Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), and Mixed Reality (MxR) have become popular immersive reality technologies for cultural knowledge dissemination in Virtual Heritage (VH). These technologies have been utilized for enriching museums with a personalized visiting experience and digital content tailored to the historical and cultural context of the museums and heritage sites. Various interaction methods, such as sensor-based, device-based, tangible, collaborative, multimodal, and hybrid interaction methods, have also been employed by these immersive reality technologies to enable interaction with the virtual environments. However, the utilization of these technologies and interaction methods isn't often supported by a guideline that can assist Cultural Heritage Professionals (CHP) to predetermine their relevance to attain the intended objectives of the VH applications. In this regard, our paper attempts to compare the existing immersive reality technologies and interaction methods against their potential to enhance cultural learning in VH applications. To objectify the comparison, three factors have been borrowed from existing scholarly arguments in the Cultural Heritage (CH) domain. These factors are the technology's or the interaction method's potential and/or demonstrated capability to: (1) establish a contextual relationship between users, virtual content, and cultural context, (2) allow collaboration between users, and (3) enable engagement with the cultural context in the virtual environments and the virtual environment itself. Following the comparison, we have also proposed a specific integration of collaborative and multimodal interaction methods into a Mixed Reality (MxR) scenario that can be applied to VH applications that aim at enhancing cultural learning in situ.

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

Migration Histories, National Memory, and Regional Collections

Digital Augmentation of Historical Objects Through Tangible Interaction

The technological advances brought about by the Internet of Things enable new opportunities for a more direct interaction among users, objects, and places. This is an extremely valuable innovation for the cultural heritage sector, as it allows a more transparent use of technology in the digital augmentation of museums and cultural heritage sites. The possibility to augment physical objects with sensors detecting when they are moved and manipulated enables scenarios where descriptive information about objects is presented to users at the very exact time they are looking at them, stimulating engagement. This article describes a collaborative research effort among cultural heritage professionals, human--computer interaction experts, and developers that was aimed at investigating the goals and constraints curators consider for a physical encounter between visitors and historic relics. In a case study, we co-designed an interactive plinth centred on tangible interaction and evaluated the impact on the user experience of combining digital information with a hands-on experience of relics of World War I. Our findings show that visitors value this type of tangible interaction with collection objects positively, as it allows the discovery of details and the learning of aspects that normally go unnoticed. The synergy between physical and digital aspects stimulates empathy with the original users of the object and fosters social interaction.

A Survey of Geospatial Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage

The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges such as data integration and interoperability among national and regional digital cultural heritage repositories. The result is dispersed and poorly-linked cultured heritage data, backed by non-standardized search interfaces, which thwart users’ attempts to contextualize information from distributed repositories. A recently introduced geospatial semantic web is being adopted by a great many new and existing digital cultural heritage repositories to overcome these challenges. However, no one has yet conducted a conceptual survey of the geospatial semantic web concepts for a cultural heritage audience. A conceptual survey of these concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field is, therefore, needed. Such a survey equips cultural heritage professionals and practitioners with an overview of all the necessary tools, and free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic web platforms that can be used to implement geospatial semantic web-based cultural heritage repositories. Hence, this article surveys the state-of-the-art geospatial semantic web concepts, which are pertinent to the cultural heritage field. It then proposes a framework to turn geospatial cultural heritage data into machine-readable and processable resource description framework (RDF) data to use in the geospatial semantic web, with a case study to demonstrate its applicability. Furthermore, it outlines key free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic platforms for cultural heritage institutions. In addition, it examines leading cultural heritage projects employing the geospatial semantic web. Finally, the article discusses attributes of the geospatial semantic web that require more attention, that can result in generating new ideas and research questions for both the geospatial semantic web and cultural heritage fields.

Creating tangible interactions with cultural heritage: lessons learned from a large scale, long term co-design project

ABSTRACT We reflect on the process, outcomes and value generated by applying co-design to a large scale, long-term (4 years) collaboration involving designers, developers and cultural heritage professionals, with the goal of creating a platform for the realisation of tangible interactive installations. The project was pioneering in establishing and sustaining co-design for the introduction of sector-changing technology into the museum domain. We gathered extensive data about the co-design process itself, including interviews investigating the participants’ experiences and the impact on their practices. The paper provides insights from such case study, particularly with respect to value co-creation.

Communicating Cultural Heritage Resources to the Public: Experiences from the Makonde of Mtwara Region, Tanzania.

Communicating cultural heritage to the public has gained popularity in many African countries and the world at large. However,little efforts have been done to promote the practice of public archaeology in Tanzania. The main reason is the dominance of conventional archaeology which is mainly meant for academic consumption. In this kind of practice, the participation of local communities has been passive. This paper explores local communities’ understanding of cultural heritage resources focusing on local communities in the Mtwara Region of Tanzania. The results of this study reveal that little effort has been made by archaeologists and cultural heritage professionals to create awareness among local communities on matters related to archaeology and cultural heritage resources. Apart from discussing the state of local communities’ awareness on archaeology and cultural heritage resources, the paper also discusses the importance of communicating cultural heritage resources to the general public and the need to engage local communities in the conservation and preservation of cultural heritage resources.

Web archives as a data resource for digital scholars

The aim of this article is to provide an exploratory analysis of the landscape of web archiving activities in Europe. Our contribution, based on desk research, and complemented with data from interviews with representatives of European heritage institutions, provides a descriptive overview of the state-of-the-art of national web archiving in Europe. It is written for a broad interdisciplinary audience, including cultural heritage professionals, IT specialists and managers, and humanities and social science researchers. The legal, technical and operational aspects of web archiving and the value of web archives as born-digital primary research resources are both explored. In addition to investigating the organisations involved and the scope of their web archiving programmes, the curatorial aspects of the web archiving process, such as selection of web content, the tools used and the provision of access and discovery services are also considered. Furthermore, general policies related to web archiving programmes are analysed. The article concludes by offering four important issues that digital scholars should consider when using web archives as a historical data source. Whilst recognising that this study was limited to a sample of only nine web archives, this article can nevertheless offer some useful insights into the technical, legal, curatorial and policy-related aspects of web archiving. Finally, this paper could function as a stepping stone for more extensive and qualitative research.