Digital Cultural Heritage Collections Research Articles

Introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Natural and Cultural Heritage: Opportunities and Challenges

This introduction to the special issue “Digital Natural and Cultural Heritage” has two aims: First, it briefly introduces individual contributions and explains how they relate to one another. Second, it explains our motivation for producing a special issue aimed at bridging the perceived gap between the fields of digital natural and cultural heritage. More concretely, it presents different computational approaches to tackle heterogeneity in digital natural and cultural heritage collections. Here the goal is to make information retrievable, interlinked, and interpretable for researchers and the general public. However, instead of offering final solutions, this special issue rather hopes to highlight the enormous potential that collaborations across domains have. We hope that we offer a starting point for transdisciplinary research in which researchers, curators, and infrastructure developers of both domains communicate and work much tighter together.

A Culture of Copyright: a Scoping Study on Open Access to Digital Cultural Heritage Collections in the UK

A Culture of Copyright: a Scoping Study on Open Access to Digital Cultural Heritage Collections in the UK

A survey of the copyright and open access policies of 63 GLAMs from the UK GLAM Sample - Appendix 2 for A Culture of Copyright: A scoping study on open access to digital cultural heritage collections in the UK

A survey of the copyright and open access policies of 63 GLAMs from the UK GLAM Sample - Appendix 2 for A Culture of Copyright: A scoping study on open access to digital cultural heritage collections in the UK

Bridging the Gap

The year of COVID-19, 2020, brought unique experiences to everyone in their daily as well as their professional life. Facing many challenges of division in all aspects (social distancing, political and social divisions, remote work environments), University of South Florida Libraries took the lead in exploring how to overcome these various separations by providing access to its high-quality information sources to its local community and beyond. This paper shares the insights of using Linked Data technology to provide easy access to digital cultural heritage collections not only for the scholarly communities but also for those underrepresented user groups. The authors present the challenges at this special time of the history, discuss the possible solutions, and propose future work to further the effort.

Misappropriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage – Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Era

The digitization of cultural heritage has become a common practice among cultural and educational institutions. The Internet and the widespread of new technologies have made the heritage more accessible and facilitates cultural exchange. However, digitization both raises challenges and creates opportunities for the sustainable and appropriate treatment of Indigenous digital cultural heritage collections, as the use of new technologies may render such heritage more vulnerable to misappropriation and misuse. It is therefore vital to investigate the possibilities of Intellectual Property tools to protect, preserve, and promote such heritage. This article addresses the following questions with respect the Indigenous heritage: What is the nature of the relationship between IP protection and the safeguarding of intangible heritage?; What are the consequences of misappropriation and misuse of traditional cultural expressions for Indigenous Peoples?; and What is the impact of digitization on Indigenous cultural heritage?

DPLA in the Pacific Northwest: The Orbis Cascade Alliance Case

The Orbis Cascade Alliance’s journey to becoming a Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) Service Hub illustrates some important challenges and opportunities in the world of digital cultural heritage work. Released in 2013, DPLA brings together cultural heritage content on a national digital platform. Since 2014 the Alliance has moved towards DPLA membership as part of a broader strategy to aggregate its members’ digital cultural heritage collections and make them more discoverable. Competing strategies for making content discoverable, limited financial resources, and differences in missions between institutions have been obstacles as the Alliance has worked towards aggregated collections and DPLA membership. The DPLA has experienced recent growing pains as evidenced by a staff downsizing in November 2018 and the closing of a major Service Hub shortly thereafter. Though the Alliance membership has made extensive progress in metadata standardization and aggregation in preparation for a DPLA ingest, as of June 2019, Alliance DPLA activity is on hold until a new Program Manager for Unique and Local Content comes on board.

Back to basics

PurposeTo describe how academic libraries can support digital humanities (DH) research by leveraging established library values and strengths to provide support for preservation and access and physical and digital spaces for researchers and communities, specifically focused on cultural heritage collections.Design/methodology/approachThe experiences of the authors in collaborating with DH scholars and community organizations is discussed with references to the literature. The paper suggests how research libraries can use existing expertise and infrastructure to support the development of digital cultural heritage collections and DH research.FindingsDeveloping working collaborations with DH researchers and community organizations is a productive way to engage in impactful cultural heritage digital projects. It can aid resource allocation decisions to support active research, strategic goals, community needs and the development and preservation of unique, locally relevant collections. Libraries do not need to radically transform themselves to do this work, they have established strengths that can be effective in meeting the challenges of DH research.Practical implicationsAcademic libraries should strategically direct the work they already excel at to support DH research and work with scholars and communities to build collections and infrastructure to support these initiatives.Originality/valueThe paper recommends practical approaches, supported by literature and local examples, that could be taken when building DH and community-engaged cultural heritage projects.

Promoting user engagement with digital cultural heritage collections

In the context of cooperating in a project whose central aim has been the production of a corpus agnostic research environment supporting access to and exploitation of digital cultural heritage collections, we have worked towards promoting user engagement with the collections. The aim of this paper is to present the methods and the solutions that have been envisaged and implemented to engage a diversified range of users with digital collections. Innovative solutions to stimulate and enhance user engagement have been achieved through a sustained and broad-based involvement of different cohorts of users. In particular, we propose the use of narratives to support and guide users within the collection and present them the main available tools. In moving beyond the specialized, search-based and stereotyped norm, the environment that we have contributed to developing offers a new approach for accessing and interacting with cultural heritage collections. It shows the value of an adaptive interface that dynamically responds to support the user, whatever his or her level of experience with digital environments or familiarity with the content may be.

Visualization of Cultural Heritage Collection Data: State of the Art and Future Challenges.

After decades of digitization, large cultural heritage collections have emerged on the web, which contain massive stocks of content from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This increase in digital cultural heritage data promises new modes of analysis and increased levels of access for academic scholars and casual users alike. Going beyond the standard representations of search-centric and grid-based interfaces, a multitude of approaches has recently started to enable visual access to cultural collections, and to explore them as complex and comprehensive information spaces by the means of interactive visualizations. In contrast to conventional web interfaces, we witness a widening spectrum of innovative visualization types specially designed for rich collections from the cultural heritage sector. This new class of information visualizations gives rise to a notable diversity of interaction and representation techniques while lending currency and urgency to a discussion about principles such as serendipity, generosity, and criticality in connection with visualization design. With this survey, we review information visualization approaches to digital cultural heritage collections and reflect on the state of the art in techniques and design choices. We contextualize our survey with humanist perspectives on the field and point out opportunities for future research.

Creating Digital Cultural Heritage Collections in an Urban Academic Library Setting

As libraries develop digital cultural heritage collections the relationship with the organizations that own the collection are vital to the success of the process. This is ground that libraries have typically not operated. Organizations external to libraries that own collections have many needs beyond the simple digitization process. IUPUI University Library is an urban academic library that has worked on developing relationships with external organizations for almost ten years. During this time there have been many hurdles and lessons learned. This paper highlights some of the trends in relationship building with community organizations and offers two unique case studies that demonstrate the challenges libraries are likely to face. Other academic, research, and public libraries can benefit from developing relationships similar to those described and enhance the creation of cultural heritage collections.

APIs and Researchers: The Emperor's New Clothes?

As part of the Europeana Cloud (eCloud) project, Trinity College Dublin investigated best practice in the use of web services, such as APIs, for accessing large data sets from cultural heritage collections. This research looked into the provision and use of APIs, and moreover, whether or not more customised programmatic access to datasets is what researchers want or need. In order to understand whether current patterns of API usage reflect a skills gap on the part of researchers or a mismatch of tool to purpose, we looked not only at the creators and developer/users of APIs, but also at humanists already re-using big data; approaches in cultural heritage institutions and other research infrastructures to bring API use to non-technical audiences; and the kinds of training and other support services available or emerging within the data-intensive humanities research lifecycle. We conducted both desk research and a series of 11 interviews with figures working as researchers, developers or data providers, including figures from both the API development and the data usage communities. This research, conducted under the eCloud project and supported by the European Commission’s ICT Policy and Support Programme (Grant number 325091), was begun in March 2014 and is now in its concluding validation stage. The results of the research are not yet finalised, but the contribution is already emerging of this work to the debate about APIs being either the way forward for digital cultural heritage collections, or the Emperor’s New Clothes (or maybe a bit of both).

CULTURA Outcomes for Improving the User's Engagement with Cultural Heritage Collections

This paper reports on the outcomes of the CULTURA project that aims to improve user engagement with digital cultural heritage collections. The IPSA digital collection has been used as a case study for the development of novel personalised access tools for a variety of different user categories. The evaluation results collected on user engagement with the used cultural heritage collections show that the users become involved and engaged.

Exploring evaluative methods for large‐scale local history

AbstractLocal history is a topic of proven interest to library users. Digital cultural heritage collections and aggregations offer an ever‐growing wealth of digitized, primary source materials to support local history research. Yet methods for strategic development and evaluation of local history collections and aggregations remain sparse. In this paper we present a multimodal pilot study to explore methods for evaluating local history coverage in digital collections and aggregations. We explore the possibility of employing automatic classification to identify items and collections relevant to local history, and conduct an exploratory metadata analysis to discern features of collections that contribute to their usefulness for local history research.

Knowledge-Based Linguistic Annotation of Digital Cultural Heritage Collections

A method for automatically annotating objects in digital cultural heritage collections uses structured vocabulary concepts and their metadata schema roles.