Modernising Tasmania’s archives and libraries legislation consultation paper

 This paper outlines specific areas for review and provides a series of recommendations to the existing legislation governing Tasmania ’s public libraries and archives services, namely : Libraries Act 1984, and Archives Act 1983. It is intended that the two Acts remain as separate pieces of legislation, w hich combined with the relevant subordinate legislation, make up the legislative framework for the Tasmania public library and archives service , as administered by LINC Tasmania . The revision of the existing legislation will ensure: currency and consistency with contemporary library, archives and associated services consistency and uniformity between the libraries and archives legislation compliance with modern drafting standards including clear, readily understood language, definitions and intent, and the legislation is able to be readily updated in the future without significant rewrites. The proposed changes are mostly administrative in nature and will have no impact on the provision of library and archives services to clients. It is important to note that this Paper reflects the fact that no conclusions in relation to the issues identified have been reached. The paper is split into two main sections associated with the proposed amendments to each Act, and should be read in conjunction with the current legislation, which is available at: www.thelaw.tas.gov.au. Comments and feedback on the recommendations contained in this paper are invited from stakeholders that ha ve an interest or expertise in the business of LINC Tasmania, and in particular, public library services, Tasmanian publications or documentary heritage collections. Feedback received through the consultation process will help to refine the proposals that will be incorporated into the Office of the Pa rliamentary Counsel’s drafting processes. Once a draft Bill for each Act has been developed , further consultation will be undertaken. The closing date for feedback is 5pm Friday 24 May 2013

Introduction : user studies for digital library development

Introductory chapter to the edited collection on user studies in digital library development. Contains a general introduction to the topic and biographical sketches of the contributors.peer-reviewe

European Capitals of Culture as a tool of enhancing economic development and urban branding, a proposal for Tbilisi, Georgia

Se analiza el desarrollo económico producido por ser capitales culturales, el impacto urbano y socioeconómico que conlleva. Se propone Tbilisi como ejemplo para apreciar el impacto económico de la cultura.Grado en Comerci

Cultural Heritage Accessibility in the Digital Era and the Greek Legal Framework

New technologies provide great opportunities for cultural heritage to become more widely accessible and for cultural experience to be more meaningful. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the strengths and vulnerabilities of the cultural heritage sector and the need to accelerate its digital transformation to make the most of the opportunities it provides. The Commission Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation (2011/711/EU) concluded that there is an urgent need to protect and preserve European cultural heritage, and, in particular, endangered cultural heritage is still present. However, the diversity of legal approaches to cultural heritage by the Member States discourages the creation of a common European data space for cultural heritage as the European Commission recently proclaimed. In Greece, there have been significant efforts in recent decades to digitise and digitally preserve cultural heritage goods. However, the attention was not drew upon the accessibility and reuse of the digitized cultural heritage content. According to the relevant regulatory framework the existing rules on the use of digital technologies for the reproduction, use and preservation of cultural heritage content is obviously outdated. According to the paragraphs 4 and 5 of article 46 of the Greek Code for the protection of antiquities and cultural heritage in general (Law 4858/2021), a previous permission granted by the Ministry of Culture is required for the production, reproduction and dissemination to the public of impressions, copies or depictions of monuments belonging to the Public Sector, or immovable monuments that are located within archaeological sites and historical places or are isolated, or movable monuments that are kept in museums or public collections, in any way and by any means whatsoever, including Information Communication Technologies. Such permission is granted to natural or legal persons for a fee paid to the Hellenic Organization of Cultural Resources Development (HOCRED) upon the decision of the Minister of Culture, while the decision also specifies the temporal validity of the permission, the terms on which the permission is granted and the fee that must be paid. The production, reproduction and use of the aforementioned goods for other purposes, such as artistic, educational or scientific purposes, is again allowed for a fee paid to HOCRED, however, the fee can be waived upon the decision of the Minister of Culture. This Paper will examine the existing Greek legal framework and will attempt to propose an appropriate framework that will ensure open access to the digitized cultural heritage assets, enhance the recovery and transformation of the cultural heritage sector and support cultural heritage institutions in becoming more empowered and more resilient in the future.</p

ICTs for Accessing, Understanding and Safeguarding Cultural Heritage: The Experience of INCEPTION and ROCK H2020 Projects

Today digital technologies offer great opportunities in the field of Cultural Heritage (CH). After a general overview of the European policy documents on CH digitisation, the paper aims to reflect on tools, procedures and methodologies in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as a new way of visualization, application and data collection towards accessing, understanding and safeguarding our historic built environment. The focus will be on two ongoing H2020 projects, INCEPTION and ROCK, selected to address the problem of CH digitisation and the access to the corresponding digitized resources in relation to historic buildings and urban districts. Therefore, they are presented as inspiring good practices for tackling this issue considering its impacts both at the architectural and urban scale. Stressing the potentials of enabling technologies, such as 3D laser surveys, environment and climate sensors, large crowd monitoring tools and CH analytic, they are also able to orient future research beyond 2020

Semantically-enhanced recommendations in cultural heritage

In the Web 2.0 environment, institutes and organizations are starting to open up their previously isolated and heterogeneous collections in order to provide visitors with maximal access. Semantic Web technologies act as instrumental in integrating these rich collections of metadata by defining ontologies which accommodate different representation schemata and inconsistent naming conventions over the various vocabularies. Facing the large amount of metadata with complex semantic structures, it is becoming more and more important to support visitors with a proper selection and presentation of information. In this context, the Dutch Science Foundation (NWO) funded the Cultural Heritage Information Personalization (CHIP) project in early 2005, as part of the Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage (CATCH) program in the Netherlands. It is a collaborative project between the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, the Eindhoven University of Technology and the Telematica Instituut. The problem statement that guides the research of this thesis is as follows: Can we support visitors with personalized access to semantically-enriched collections? To study this question, we chose cultural heritage (museums) as an application domain, and the semantically rich background knowledge about the museum collection provides a basis to our research. On top of it, we deployed user modeling and recommendation technologies in order to provide personalized services for museum visitors. Our main contributions are: (i) we developed an interactive rating dialog of artworks and art concepts for a quick instantiation of the CHIP user model, which is built as a specialization of FOAF and mapped to an existing event model ontology SEM; (ii) we proposed a hybrid recommendation algorithm, combining both explicit and implicit relations from the semantic structure of the collection. On the presentation level, we developed three tools for end-users: Art Recommender, Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Following a user-centered design cycle, we performed a series of evaluations with museum visitors to test the effectiveness of recommendations using the rating dialog, different ways to build an optimal user model and the prediction accuracy of the hybrid algorithm. Chapter 1 introduces the research questions, our approaches and the outline of this thesis. Chapter 2 gives an overview of our work at the first stage. It includes (i) the semantic enrichment of the Rijksmuseum collection, which is mapped to three Getty vocabularies (ULAN, AAT, TGN) and the Iconclass thesaurus; (ii) the minimal user model ontology defined as a specialization of FOAF, which only stores user ratings at that time, (iii) the first implementation of the content-based recommendation algorithm in our first tool, the CHIP Art Recommender. Chapter 3 presents two other tools: Tour Wizard and Mobile Tour Guide. Based on the user's ratings, the Web-based Tour Wizard recommends museum tours consisting of recommended artworks that are currently available for museum exhibitions. The Mobile Tour Guide converts recommended tours to mobile devices (e.g. PDA) that can be used in the physical museum space. To connect users' various interactions with these tools, we made a conversion of the online user model stored in RDF into XML format which the mobile guide can parse, and in this way we keep the online and on-site user models dynamically synchronized. Chapter 4 presents the second generation of the Mobile Tour Guide with a real time routing system on different mobile devices (e.g. iPod). Compared with the first generation, it can adapt museum tours based on the user's ratings artworks and concepts, her/his current location in the physical museum and the coordinates of the artworks and rooms in the museum. In addition, we mapped the CHIP user model to an existing event model ontology SEM. Besides ratings, it can store additional user activities, such as following a tour and viewing artworks. Chapter 5 identifies a number of semantic relations within one vocabulary (e.g. a concept has a broader/narrower concept) and across multiple vocabularies (e.g. an artist is associated to an art style). We applied all these relations as well as the basic artwork features in content-based recommendations and compared all of them in terms of usefulness. This investigation also enables us to look at the combined use of artwork features and semantic relations in sequence and derive user navigation patterns. Chapter 6 defines the task of personalized recommendations and decomposes the task into a number of inference steps for ontology-based recommender systems, from a perspective of knowledge engineering. We proposed a hybrid approach combining both explicit and implicit recommendations. The explicit relations include artworks features and semantic relations with preliminary weights which are derived from the evaluation in Chapter 5. The implicit relations are built between art concepts based on instance-based ontology matching. Chapter 7 gives an example of reusing user interaction data generated by one application into another one for providing cross-application recommendations. In this example, user tagging about cultural events, gathered by iCITY, is used to enrich the user model for generating content-based recommendations in the CHIP Art Recommender. To realize full tagging interoperability, we investigated the problems that arise in mapping user tags to domain ontologies, and proposed additional mechanisms, such as the use of SKOS matching operators to deal with the possible mis-alignment of tags and domain-specific ontologies. We summarized to what extent the problem statement and each of the research questions are answered in Chapter 8. We also discussed a number of limitations in our research and looked ahead at what may follow as future work

Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) in the Semantic Web: A Multi-Dimensional Review

Since the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) specification and its SKOS eXtension for Labels (SKOS-XL) became formal W3C recommendations in 2009 a significant number of conventional knowledge organization systems (KOS) (including thesauri, classification schemes, name authorities, and lists of codes and terms, produced before the arrival of the ontology-wave) have made their journeys to join the Semantic Web mainstream. This paper uses "LOD KOS" as an umbrella term to refer to all of the value vocabularies and lightweight ontologies within the Semantic Web framework. The paper provides an overview of what the LOD KOS movement has brought to various communities and users. These are not limited to the colonies of the value vocabulary constructors and providers, nor the catalogers and indexers who have a long history of applying the vocabularies to their products. The LOD dataset producers and LOD service providers, the information architects and interface designers, and researchers in sciences and humanities, are also direct beneficiaries of LOD KOS. The paper examines a set of the collected cases (experimental or in real applications) and aims to find the usages of LOD KOS in order to share the practices and ideas among communities and users. Through the viewpoints of a number of different user groups, the functions of LOD KOS are examined from multiple dimensions. This paper focuses on the LOD dataset producers, vocabulary producers, and researchers (as end-users of KOS).Comment: 31 pages, 12 figures, accepted paper in International Journal on Digital Librarie

Literature review of the interplay between education, employment, health and wellbeing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote areas

The availability of timely, comprehensive and good quality data specifically relevant to remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander notions of health and wellbeing has been a significant obstacle to understanding and addressing related disadvantage in a meaningful way. This literature review for the CRC-REP Interplay Between Health, Wellbeing, Education and Employment project explored existing wellbeing frameworks at global and local levels that are relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote Australia.Current government frameworks that collect data about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people often produce a narrative that describes deficit, disadvantage and dysfunction. The frameworks include the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Performance Framework, the Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Framework, the Australia Bureau of Statistics Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing Framework and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey. These frameworks gather statistical information for the purposes of policy analysis and program development and therefore use indicators that are important to policy. Increasingly, government frameworks are including holistic measures of health such as cultural health, governance and the impacts of colonisation.This literature review has identified the need to develop a wellbeing framework that not only accurately represents education, employment, health and wellbeing and the interplay between these and other factors, but that also recognises the strengths and resilience of Aboriginal and Torres Strait people as well as reflecting their worldviews, perspectives and values. For example, a definition of ‘wellbeing’ that highlights the importance of physical, social, emotional, cultural and spiritual influences at the level of the individual and the community has been endorsed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups and governments alike and sustained for over 20 years. Accordingly, this literature review has been organised along these topics.In addition, the literature suggests that optimal wellbeing occurs when there is strong cultural identity in combination with control, achievement and inclusion at a wider societal level, such as through successful engagement in education and employment. Listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to learn of their conceptual thinking, knowledge and understanding, and responding to their priorities and ideas are crucial parts of the policy equation to improve outcomes across education, employment, health and wellbeing. The challenges in developing an appropriate wellbeing framework, then, are ensuring the active involvement and participation of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.One example of how this has worked is provided by the Community Indicators Victoria Project, which used local-level data to address issues that the local community identified as important. A focus on strengths is also important, and is exemplified in the Social and Emotional Wellbeing Framework of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Council and National Mental Health Working Group. Various existing programs – such as ‘Caring for Country’ – can be adapted to capture data about connection to country, for example, and how that impacts on physical and mental health. Critically, the core domains of education, employment and health need to be extended to include activities and concepts that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people consider important to these areas.Recommendations for the development of a wellbeing framework are proposed here, derived from information available in the literature. Rather than being definitive, these recommendations provide a starting point for consultation and adaption towards establishing a wellbeing framework and operational system for collecting and analysing long-term health and wellbeing data for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in remote Australia as part of the research conducted by CRC-REP