The Ohio State University Libraries Audiovisual Assessment Interim Report

The 26-month audiovisual (AV) assessment took place from June 2017 to August 2019 with a focus on rare or unique audiovisual items. Curators and archivists within each unit identified collections or collecting areas for significance or research value. Approximately 65% of AV materials in seven library units has not been assessed. Upon completion, 18,389 audiovisual items in 32 distinct formats were individually assessed

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

Thinking Outside the Box: Strategies and Examples for in the Preservation and Development of Heritage

This paper present examples of positive economic and social impacts of cultural projects and mentions an interpretation of the positive interaction between development and culture. Several best practices are explored for each single topic and guidelines for future IDB projects are suggested. This paper complement the document: Thinking Outside the Box: Arguments for IADB's Involvement in the Preservation and Development of Heritage in which were discussed topics related to the role of culture in development and the social impact of culture.Culture & Arts, Heritage Conservation, Urban Development

Emergent digital services in public libraries : a domain study

Purpose: This paper explores the emergence of digital services in the public library domain via an extensive study of the websites of all Scottish public library services Design/methodology/approach: In a 4 month period all 32 of Scotland’s public library authority websites were visited by a researcher. The goal of the researcher was to record the options available from the library homepages in the following way: •Role of library in providing page content: content provider or access provider? •Was the page providing a digital service? •What was the audience for the page? Adult, child, or not specified? •Description of page content •Any noted usability issues Each site was only visited to three levels below that of the initial homepage. Findings: The study found a good standard of innovation in digital services around LMS functions, offering users the ability to keep in control of their borrowing and reserving. In addition there was a consistent set of electronic reference resources subscribed to by multiple libraries, offering high quality information both within the library and for library members from their home or workplace. Problems were found with regards to guidance on the usage of these resources, as well as confusion and inconsistency in terminology usage across different library services. Research limitations/implications: The paper examines only Scottish public library sites, thus can only claim to be representative of that country. It also can only represent the sites at the time they were examined. Practical implications: The paper should be of interest to public and other librarians interested in patterns across web sites in their sector. Originality/value: This is the first national study of Scottish public library websites and its findings should be of value as a result

DiSCmap : digitisation of special collections mapping, assessment, prioritisation. Final project report

Traditionally, digitisation has been led by supply rather than demand. While end users are seen as a priority they are not directly consulted about which collections they would like to have made available digitally or why. This can be seen in a wide range of policy documents throughout the cultural heritage sector, where users are positioned as central but where their preferences are assumed rather than solicited. Post-digitisation consultation with end users isequally rare. How are we to know that digitisation is serving the needs of the Higher Education community and is sustainable in the long-term? The 'Digitisation in Special Collections: mapping, assessment and prioritisation' (DiSCmap) project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Research Information Network (RIN), aimed to:- Identify priority collections for potential digitisation housed within UK Higher Education's libraries, archives and museums as well as faculties and departments.- Assess users' needs and demand for Special Collections to be digitised across all disciplines.- Produce a synthesis of available knowledge about users' needs with regard to usability and format of digitised resources.- Provide recommendations for a strategic approach to digitisation within the wider context and activity of leading players both in the public and commercial sector.The project was carried out jointly by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR) and the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) and has taken a collaborative approach to the creation of a user-driven digitisation prioritisation framework, encouraging participation and collective engagement between communities.Between September 2008 and March 2009 the DiSCmap project team asked over 1,000 users, including intermediaries (vocational users who take care of collections) and end users (university teachers, researchers and students) a variety of questions about which physical and digital Special Collections they make use of and what criteria they feel must be considered when selecting materials for digitisation. This was achieved through workshops, interviews and two online questionnaires. Although the data gathered from these activities has the limitation of reflecting only a partial view on priorities for digitisation - the view expressed by those institutions who volunteered to take part in the study - DiSCmap was able to develop:- a 'long list' of 945 collections nominated for digitisation both by intermediaries andend-users from 70 HE institutions (see p. 21);- a framework of user-driven prioritisation criteria which could be used to inform current and future digitisation priorities; (see p. 45)- a set of 'short lists' of collections which exemplify the application of user-driven criteria from the prioritisation framework to the long list (see Appendix X):o Collections nominated more than once by various groups of users.o Collections related to a specific policy framework, eg HEFCE's strategically important and vulnerable subjects for Mathematics, Chemistry and Physics.o Collections on specific thematic clusters.o Collections with highest number of reasons for digitisation

Public financing of the arts in England

The paper describes the method, amount and composition of public financing of the arts and heritage services in England during the 1990s. This offers the background to a discussion of how far the rationale for government financing for such services can rely on arguments derived from welfare economics. The presence of ‘market failure’ has been widely accepted by successive governments and their advisers, but attempts to remove it have encountered the familiar problems of ensuring allocative and technical efficiency when production subsidies are the main policy instrument. Special attention is devoted to the policy dilemmas that are likely to arise in the years ahead in the performing arts, heritage and broadcasting.

ABSTRACTS OF PRESENTATIONS

Second International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives, abstracts of presentation

Investigating how South African humanities researchers engage with digital archives

OBJECTIVE: Despite technological developments in the Digital Humanities space, it is unclear that the facilities offered by digital archives support the needs of Humanities researchers in developing countries. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how South African Humanities scholars use digital archives in their research as well as in teaching and other academic activities. METHODS: This thesis utilizes non-random convenience sampling. A feature determination study provided the sampling frame, defined the scope for the survey tool, and was used to uncover trends in digital archives development in South Africa. A self-administered online survey was conducted with Humanities researchers in South Africa to answer the research question. The thesis utilises basic descriptive statistics in its attempt to study and interpret the responses of participating researchers. RESULTS: 102 participants responded to the online survey. Despite many South African digital archives having the functionality to discover, browse and search collections, they are missing the features for collaboration, accessing and managing resources. Only 20% of the survey respondents are satisfied with South African digital archives' process of making content easy to find and accessible, whereas 48% of the respondents consider themselves users of complex digital resources, 44% have the knowledge and experience for using Digital Humanities tools and services, and more than 70% find technology to be useful for learning and teaching. CONCLUSIONS: The usage of archives and their functionalities vary widely. Users have stronger preferences for tools that support basic discovery and personal and collaborative research, but many consider existing support for basic features to be inadequate. In terms of advanced functionalities for managing digital resources, users are interested in these to varying levels, but the inadequate support means that these are still somewhat speculative

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 usercentered, 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 highlevel 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

Investigating user experience and bias mitigation of the multi-modal retrieval of historical data

Decolonisation has raised the discussion of technology having the responsibility of presenting multiple perspectives to users. This is specifically relevant to African precolonial heritage artefact data, where the data contains the bias of the curators of the artefacts and there are primary concerns surrounding the social responsibility of these systems. Historians have argued that common information retrieval algorithms may further bias results presented to users. While research for mitigating bias in information retrieval is steered in the direction of artificial intelligence and automation, an often-neglected approach is that of user-control. User-control has proven to be beneficial in other research areas and is strongly aligned with the core principles of decolonisation. Thus, the effects on user experience, bias mitigation, and retrieval effectiveness from the addition of user-control and algorithmic variation to a multimodal information retrieval system containing precolonial African heritage data was investigated in this study. This was done by conducting two experiments: 1) an experiment to provide a baseline offline evaluation of various algorithms for text and image retrieval and 2) an experiment to investigate the user experience with a retrieval system that allowed them to compare algorithms. In the first experiment, the differences in retrieval effectiveness between colour-based pre-processing algorithms, shape-based preprocessing algorithms, and pre-processing algorithms based on a combination of colour- and shape-detection, was explored. The differences in retrieval effectiveness between stemming, stopword removal and synonym query expansion was also evaluated for text retrieval. In the second experiment, the manner in which users experience bias in the context of common information retrieval algorithms for both the textual and image data that are available in typical historical archives was explored. Users were presented with the results generated by multiple algorithmic variations, in a variety of different result formats, and using a variety of different search methods, affording them the opportunity to decide what they deem provides them with a more relevant set of results. The results of the study show that algorithmic variation can lead to significantly improved retrieval performance with respect to image-based retrieval. The results also show that users potentially prefer shape-based image algorithms rather than colour-based image algorithms, and, that shape-based image algorithms can lead to significantly improved retrieval of historical data. The results also show that users have justifiable preferences for multimodal query and result formats to improve user experience and that users believe they can control bias using algorithmic variatio