Location based modelling for Heritage Mobile Applications

Recent strategies for increasing museum income have heightened the need to motivate visits. Consequently, ICT has been increasingly used in historical locations to educate and entertain visitors. This exploratory study concerns one such museum that is developing its understanding of these technologies through the perspective of visitors as the key stakeholder. It views the significance of historical landscapes’ technologies that reflect the views of visitors. A quantitative study is conducted to explore preferred technologies and the way in which digital media can be presented in a natural environment, as well as how visitors prefer such experiences to be described. To define and assess the technologies in Dorset County Museum and Maiden Castle, data was collected using a survey in both locations. The results identified differences in visitors’ perceptions regarding the importance of technologies in these museum and physical locations. The outcomes of this study can be applied to improve the effectiveness of technology in interlinked heritage landscapes through development of mobile or web prototypes

Personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries

Widespread use of the Internet has resulted in digital libraries that are increasingly used by diverse communities of users for diverse purposes and in which sharing and collaboration have become important social elements. As such libraries become commonplace, as their contents and services become more varied, and as their patrons become more experienced with computer technology, users will expect more sophisticated services from these libraries. A simple search function, normally an integral part of any digital library, increasingly leads to user frustration as user needs become more complex and as the volume of managed information increases. Proactive digital libraries, where the library evolves from being passive and untailored, are seen as offering great potential for addressing and overcoming these issues and include techniques such as personalisation and recommender systems. In this paper, following on from the DELOS/NSF Working Group on Personalisation and Recommender Systems for Digital Libraries, which met and reported during 2003, we present some background material on the scope of personalisation and recommender systems in digital libraries. We then outline the working group’s vision for the evolution of digital libraries and the role that personalisation and recommender systems will play, and we present a series of research challenges and specific recommendations and research priorities for the field

Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online

This open access book explores the multiple forms of curatorial agencies that develop when museum collection digitisations, narratives and new research findings circulate online. Focusing on Viking Age objects, it tracks the effects of antagonistic debates on discussion forums and the consequences of search engines, personalisation, and machine learning on American-based online platforms. Furthermore, it considers eco-systemic processes comprising computation, rare-earth minerals, electrical currents and data centres and cables as novel forms of curatorial actions. Thus, it explores curatorial agency as social constructivist, semiotic, algorithmic, and material. This book is of interest to scholars and students in the fields of museum studies, cultural heritage and media studies. It also appeals to museum practitioners concerned with curatorial innovation at the intersection of humanist interpretations and new materialist and more-than-human frameworks

Museum Digitisations and Emerging Curatorial Agencies Online

This open access book explores the multiple forms of curatorial agencies that develop when museum collection digitisations, narratives and new research findings circulate online. Focusing on Viking Age objects, it tracks the effects of antagonistic debates on discussion forums and the consequences of search engines, personalisation, and machine learning on American-based online platforms. Furthermore, it considers eco-systemic processes comprising computation, rare-earth minerals, electrical currents and data centres and cables as novel forms of curatorial actions. Thus, it explores curatorial agency as social constructivist, semiotic, algorithmic, and material. This book is of interest to scholars and students in the fields of museum studies, cultural heritage and media studies. It also appeals to museum practitioners concerned with curatorial innovation at the intersection of humanist interpretations and new materialist and more-than-human frameworks

Digital Preservation, Archival Science and Methodological Foundations for Digital Libraries

Digital libraries, whether commercial, public or personal, lie at the heart of the information society. Yet, research into their long‐term viability and the meaningful accessibility of their contents remains in its infancy. In general, as we have pointed out elsewhere, ‘after more than twenty years of research in digital curation and preservation the actual theories, methods and technologies that can either foster or ensure digital longevity remain startlingly limited.’ Research led by DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE) and the Digital Preservation Cluster of DELOS has allowed us to refine the key research challenges – theoretical, methodological and technological – that need attention by researchers in digital libraries during the coming five to ten years, if we are to ensure that the materials held in our emerging digital libraries are to remain sustainable, authentic, accessible and understandable over time. Building on this work and taking the theoretical framework of archival science as bedrock, this paper investigates digital preservation and its foundational role if digital libraries are to have long‐term viability at the centre of the global information society.

'Breaking the glass': preserving social history in virtual environments

New media technologies play an important role in the evolution of our society. Traditional museums and heritage sites have evolved from the ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that focused mainly on the authority of the voice organising content, to the places that offer interactivity as a means to experience historical and cultural events of the past. They attempt to break down the division between visitors and historical artefacts, employing modern technologies that allow the audience to perceive a range of perspectives of the historical event. In this paper, we discuss virtual reconstruction and interactive storytelling techniques as a research methodology and educational and presentation practices for cultural heritage sites. We present the Narrating the Past project as a case study, in order to illustrate recent changes in the preservation of social history and guided tourist trails that aim to make the visitor’s experience more than just an architectural walk through

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

Digital cultural heritage: from OAIS until the personalised augmented experiences: perspectives

Comunicação apresentada no Seminário International sobre "Archiving in Performing Arts", realizado em Coimbra a 16 de Novembro de 2017.Aborda-se a Herança Cultural e as problemáticas históricas e atuais relacionadas com os processos de registo e salvaguarda através dos meios digitais, incluindo a estandardização de formatos, a salvaguarda e manutenção e os sistemas de apoio à visita e fruição, apresentando exemplos de projetos concretos nacionais e europeus, passados e atuais nestas áreas, abrindo espaço para a análise e discussão dos desafios atuais e perspetivas de desenvolvimento futuro. Cultural heritage and historical and current issues related to registration and safeguarding processes through digital means, including format standardization, archiving, maintenance, and support systems for visiting and enjoyment, are presented, with examples of concrete projects national and European, past and current in these areas, opening space for the analysis and discussion of the current challenges and perspectives of future development.N/

Metadata enrichment for digital heritage: users as co-creators

This paper espouses the concept of metadata enrichment through an expert and user-focused approach to metadata creation and management. To this end, it is argued the Web 2.0 paradigm enables users to be proactive metadata creators. As Shirky (2008, p.47) argues Web 2.0’s social tools enable “action by loosely structured groups, operating without managerial direction and outside the profit motive”. Lagoze (2010, p. 37) advises, “the participatory nature of Web 2.0 should not be dismissed as just a popular phenomenon [or fad]”. Carletti (2016) proposes a participatory digital cultural heritage approach where Web 2.0 approaches such as crowdsourcing can be sued to enrich digital cultural objects. It is argued that “heritage crowdsourcing, community-centred projects or other forms of public participation”. On the other hand, the new collaborative approaches of Web 2.0 neither negate nor replace contemporary standards-based metadata approaches. Hence, this paper proposes a mixed metadata approach where user created metadata augments expert-created metadata and vice versa. The metadata creation process no longer remains to be the sole prerogative of the metadata expert. The Web 2.0 collaborative environment would now allow users to participate in both adding and re-using metadata. The case of expert-created (standards-based, top-down) and user-generated metadata (socially-constructed, bottom-up) approach to metadata are complementary rather than mutually-exclusive. The two approaches are often mistakenly considered as dichotomies, albeit incorrectly (Gruber, 2007; Wright, 2007) . This paper espouses the importance of enriching digital information objects with descriptions pertaining the about-ness of information objects. Such richness and diversity of description, it is argued, could chiefly be achieved by involving users in the metadata creation process. This paper presents the importance of the paradigm of metadata enriching and metadata filtering for the cultural heritage domain. Metadata enriching states that a priori metadata that is instantiated and granularly structured by metadata experts is continually enriched through socially-constructed (post-hoc) metadata, whereby users are pro-actively engaged in co-creating metadata. The principle also states that metadata that is enriched is also contextually and semantically linked and openly accessible. In addition, metadata filtering states that metadata resulting from implementing the principle of enriching should be displayed for users in line with their needs and convenience. In both enriching and filtering, users should be considered as prosumers, resulting in what is called collective metadata intelligence