Digital Heritage Resources Research Articles

The Maldives Heritage Survey

AbstractThe Maldives Heritage Survey was established to document cultural heritage vulnerable to human and environmental threats in the Maldives. An open-access online database is being produced to inform academic studies, support heritage-management plans and create a permanent archive of digital heritage resources.

Leopoldina online - in site digital content aggregating service

Increasing amount of digitised content is a very promising fact. It promises a wide and easy access to digitised pictures of valuable content and artefacts. But reality shows us it may be contrary – we encounter problems searching digitised content. Metadata aggregating services solve the problem. Splendid example of such is Europeana providing universal access to European digital cultural heritage resources. Locally we may know digital libraries metadata aggregators, such as Polish FBC (Federation of Digital Libraries). Very functional they have limitation, though. They provide access to limited, in terms of formats, sources. Organisations aiming towards digital transformation face a new challenge – combining variety of available digital content formats. An attempt to address problem of access to different digital resources in a Leopoldina online platform. Developed by University of Wroclaw (UWr), in cooperation with PSNC – Polish national meta data aggregator for Europeana, it aims to aggregate and deliver digital resources of various UWr units. In current paper we present goals of the project, short description of different digital resources available, metadata handling and common, universal search engine design.

Digital Heritage as Collaborative Process

This paper examines the importance of the process of collaboration and community engagement in developing and applying digital heritage resources. It draws on case studies from the authors’ experiences building partnerships between a university’s anthropology undergraduate program and a provincial museum to teach community-engaged applied digital heritage. The process of creating and using digital technologies in heritage environments were transformative for not only students but also professional archaeologists and communities, highlighting the meaningful engagement and understandings that are developed through collaborative making. However, it also highlighted the challenges facing these types of collaborations, including academic and heritage structures, digital preservation/management, and ethics and inclusivity in digitization projects.

Relative Advantages of Digital Preservation Management in Developing Countries

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this article is to explore stakeholders’ perspectives on the relative advances of digital preservation management over traditional heritage management approaches in developing countries, particularly in Africa. Specific examples from the context of Ghana are used to help understand the particular factors that influence the relative advantage of the digital preservation management innovation. The article is based on the findings of a PhD study that explored contextual factors influencing the management and preservation of digital cultural heritage resources in Ghana and it is underpinned by Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation model. An interpretive qualitative approach was employed to solicit the perspectives of 29 key stakeholders from 13 institutions in Ghana through semi-structure interviews. This was followed by an analysis of relevant literature to ascertain how the findings from the context of Ghana relate to other developing countries in Africa.Stakeholders perceive that the digital preservation management innovation has relative advantages over other traditional ways of managing and preserving heritage information in many ways, including; as an effective means to manage cultural heritage resources; enhancing collaboration and resource sharing; contributes to the building strong cultural institutions; leading to the establishment of a national digital memory for developing countries; as an effective means to preserve value of cultural identity for the long term into the digital future; and enabling research and advancement of cultural knowledge.Findings from the literature analysis also show that these relative advantages of the digital preservation management (DPM) innovation occur in similar forms in other developing countries in Africa. Further empirical studies in other developing countries are recommended to fully ascertain the main relative advantages of the DPM innovation over traditional approaches of heritage resources management and preservation.

A twitter case study for assessing digital sound

Academic and cultural heritage institutions around the world have made measurable strides in the development of digital sound archives oriented towards research and access, but their impact on scholarship and society has been little studied. Traditionally, impact has been measured by citations; yet these are problematic metrics for nontraditional outputs like sound recordings. Social media data provide a promising avenue of investigation for measuring scholarly as well as societal impact. Twitter in particular has been shown to provide a high number of references for cultural and research outputs in all disciplines. This study analyzes Twitter references pertaining to the collections of five digital sound archives: British Library Sounds, Europeana Sounds, the Internet Archive Audio Archive, PennSound, and UbuWeb. By using text analysis methods to identify high‐frequency events and trends, and labeling them with a rubric designed for measuring the impact of digital heritage resources, this study provides preliminary insights on user values as they relate to digital sound collections. Despite the limitations of using social media data, the evidence gathered in this case study characterizes aspects of the use of digital sound collections, and may point to future priorities for the digital preservation of sound.

Innovation through Large-Scale Integration of Legacy Records

Using the Chaco Research Archive (CRA) as a case study, in this article, we discuss the spectrum of intellectual decisions: conceptualization, design, and development, required to make legacy records (accumulated over many years through numerous archaeological expeditions) publicly accessible. Intellectual and operational choices permeated the design and implementation of the digital architecture to provide internet access to the vast information structures inherent in legacy records for the cultural heritage of Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. We explore how an expansive but focused repository can enable opportunities for research and foster communities of co-creation. We also use the CRA as a case study to outline some of the pitfalls of conventional academic metrics for scholarly impact and provide some alternative means to assess the value of digital heritage resources.

Memory, storytelling and the digital archive: Revitalizing community and regional identities in the virtual age

Abstract This article discusses how the interplay between the canon, the archive and performance informs the use of digital heritage resources in the construction, interpretation, representation, circulation and preservation of cultural and/or collective memory with a view to animating community and regional identities. To this end, the article draws on a range of relevant theoretical models and ethnographic fieldwork to interrogate how the aforementioned interplay enables and encourages different approaches to meaning and memory-making through the lens of two British case study heritage projects in Stoke-on-Trent (West Midlands of England) and the Isle of Bute (West Coast of Scotland). The overarching argument is that local, alternative, bottom-up approaches to telling (hi)stories and re-enacting the past not only effectively take on a socio-political dimension directed at challenging dominant, hegemonic, institutional narratives and versions of the past, but – in doing so – they also offer new and refreshingly different ways of understanding, representing, remembering and rediscovering the past meaningfully in ways that local communities and regions can relate with.

Cultural heritage open data for developing an educational platform

New strategy to promote and disseminate cultural heritage is ongoing. Linked Open Data technology suggests rethinking access to digital cultural heritage resources and their dissemination in different contexts. This paper presents the results of project which have developed a learning repository and an annotation tool to increase the content of cultural heritage according to teacher's needs. The educational platform was developed to disseminate multimedia cultural resources inside the classroom through open data access for sharing museum contents. The tools developed provide museum information to teachers who can reuse and re-contextualise them in their multimedia lessons and create educational environments to improve engagement and student learning. In this way the museum object will become a tool for teaching, new learning environments will be created and relationship between museum staff and education context will be improved.

The new Reithians

The ongoing Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Pararchive project seeks to build new interactive environments that explore issues of ownership, public and institutional relationships and provide tools for collaborative community research and creative expression using digital heritage resources.1 It was motivated by recognition that communities are encountering real barriers to organizing and connecting to resources and with each other. In the field of cultural heritage it is often difficult to access archival materials from public institutions and overcome barriers to what could and should be mutually enriching relationships. In this context, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has traditionally been seen as a problematic institution – publicly funded and immeasurably rich – yet distant and patrician. Working with Head of BBC Archive Development Tony Ageh, the project team is focusing on issues such as copyright and institutional voice as a means of facilitating a more open and collaborative audience relationship. As part of our current dialogue, we have also been examining the traditions within the BBC that might act as a block to these activities. Our initial conclusion is that a major part of the problem lies in the lack of partnership between the BBC and its licence paying audience, and we have made that a key focus of our study. This article outlines the background to the Pararchive project and the specific focus within it on the relationship between the BBC and its audiences.

The application of workflow management to digital heritage resources

Recent years have witnessed a noticeable proliferation in Digital Library Systems (DLSs) and their specialized form represented in Digital Heritage Resources (DHRs). DHRs usually manage a complex and varied mix of digital heritage objects of different types and formats. They tend to be complex in nature and usually involve complex, simultaneous and intersecting workflows. As a result, DHRs impose implementation challenges on any solutions that aim to manage their workflows. Thus, despite the proliferation of DHRs, it is a noteworthy trend that there is a general lack of workflow management solutions that can be utilized in such systems. As a research area that is rarely covered, this paper therefore presents the design and development of a novel Workflow Management System (WfMS) built to integrate with DHRs specifically, and DLSs in general. In this context, an experimental WfMS aimed to test the validity of workflow management integration with DHRs. The devised WfMS was built as a workflow management solution that can adequately address the specific hurdles imposed by DHR implementations. Additionally, a novel DHR implementation framework called DISPLAYS (Digital Library Services for Playing with Antiquity and Shared Heritage) is presented as a test bed for the proposed WfMS.

Assessing Museums Online: The Digital Heritage Sustainability (DHS) Framework

Digital materials, the primary resources for the production of contemporary culture, have brought many challenges to the heritage sector in relation to their curation, conservation, and dissemination. Digital heritage sustainability involves practices that help ensure the maintenance, enrichment, and enjoyment of digital heritage resources over periods of time that span across generations. The digital heritage sustainability (DHS) framework presented in this article provides an analytic basis for understanding the challenges associated with the use of digital materials in museums and for assessing how digital heritage resources can be sustained over time. As an example of use, the framework is applied to the Museum of London's digital resources.

Stakeholders’ Attitudes Towards the Management and Preservation of Digital Cultural Heritage Resources in Ghana

This paper presents an overview of one component of the preliminary findings from a research project that seeks to understand the various contextual factors influencing the management and preservation of digital cultural heritage resources (DPCH) in Ghana. Four main clusters of factors, i.e., attitudinal, resources, policy, and management factors, were identified as impacting on DPCH in Ghana. This paper focuses on attitudinal factors because increasing understanding of underlying attitudes and behaviours has the potential to inform meaningful and culturally appropriate strategies. The paper identifies attitudinal enablers and hindrances and concludes that the lack of interest by funders and policy makers in formal information management, and also in DPCH currently counters the enablers. Accordingly, information professionals and professional associations need to be proactive in their promotional efforts to bring about attitudinal changes to promote DPCH.

Local Electronic Cultural Repositories: Who are the Users and What is the Impact?

The CURIOS project investigates how digital archives can support local interest in local heritage and, in doing so, can contribute to community regeneration and strengthened community cohesion. Software tools that utilise semantic web/linked data technology are being developed to build a general, flexible and 'future proof' software platform to assist remote rural communities to collaboratively maintain and present information about their cultural heritage. Under this broad programme of research we are investigating how online cultural communities are transforming the ways in which local history is ‘written’ and remembered. Empirically, we focus on digital cultural heritage resources managed by community groups in remote and rural parts of the UK. Researching community-led initiatives enables us to explore how locally managed digital heritage resources can support sustainable rural areas. This paper will focus on the presentation of findings from the first case study research that has been conducted with a community initiative in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, Hebridean Connections, which is an online historical resource. We will critically reflect on the meaning of community heritage, the implications of digital resources for the preservation and communication of cultural heritage and the impact of these resources on engagement both within the local community and the broader range of users from diasporic communities, tourists and other user groups. Using data from interviews with local stakeholders in the Outer Hebrides, we identify and discuss potential tensions between the values of heritage ‘gatekeepers’ and the possibilities of a virtual archive. We argue that digital spaces for storing cultural objects has the potential to reconfigure locally-held understandings of community and place. We then go on to outline some of the challenges encountered in developing electronic cultural respositories for local historical information and, finally, we briefly outline the development of our cultural heritage 'toolkit' which seeks to overcome some of these challenges.

A textured sculpture

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to gather some empirical, baseline information on the perceived needs of end‐users of digital cultural heritage resources. The study was funded by the National Library of New Zealand in order to take end‐user needs into consideration more fully in its development and presentation of digital cultural heritage resources.Design/methodology/approachThe study's research design involved a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach; a user survey comprising self‐administered, semi‐structured questionnaires, seven face‐to‐face semi‐structured interviews and one focus group.FindingsThe findings outline the barriers users face in using New Zealand digital cultural heritage resources. They also highlight the user needs and features and characteristics they most desire in digital cultural heritage resources.Originality/valueOnly a handful of studies exist about end‐user needs with respect to the digitisation of cultural heritage materials and very few are research‐based articles. This research is the first of its kind to describe information needs of users of digital cultural heritage resources in New Zealand, and pays particular attention to the needs of historical researchers.