Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20 years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed

Bletchley Park text: using mobile and semantic web technologies to support the post-visit use of online museum resources

A number of technologies have been developed to support the museum visitor, with the aim of making their visit more educationally rewarding and/or entertaining. Examples include PDA-based personalized tour guides and virtual reality representations of cultural objects or scenes. Rather than supporting the actual visit, we decided to employ technology to support the post-visitor, that is, encourage follow-up activities among recent visitors to a museum. This allowed us to use the technology in a way that would not detract from the existing curated experience and allow the museum to provide access to additional heritage resources that cannot be presented during the physical visit. Within our application, called Bletchley Park Text, visitors express their interests by sending text (SMS) messages containing suggested keywords using their own mobile phone. The semantic description of the archive of resources is then used to retrieve and organize a collection of content into a personalized web site for use when they get home. Organization of the collection occurs both bottom-up from the semantic description of each item in the collection, and also top-down according to a formal representation of the overall museum story. In designing the interface we aimed to support exploration across the content archive rather than just the search and retrieval of specific resources. The service was developed for the Bletchley Park museum and has since been launched for use by all visitors

Designing multilingual information access to Tate Online

The Tate is Britain's premier national art gallery and includes content from internationally-renowned artists such as Constable and Turner. Like most cultural heritage institutions, the Tate provides online access to a large amount of digitized material. Given the international importance of content provided by the Tate Gallery, multilingual access would seem an ideal way in which to increase accessibility to the collections, and thereby increase traffic to the website. In this short paper we propose using the Tate as a case study for cross-language research and evaluation, determining the gallery’s requirements and the multilingual needs of their end-users

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

A geo-temporal information extraction service for processing descriptive metadata in digital libraries

In the context of digital map libraries, resources are usually described according to metadata records that define the relevant subject, location, time-span, format and keywords. On what concerns locations and time-spans, metadata records are often incomplete or they provide information in a way that is not machine-understandable (e.g. textual descriptions). This paper presents techniques for extracting geotemporal information from text, using relatively simple text mining methods that leverage on a Web gazetteer service. The idea is to go from human-made geotemporal referencing (i.e. using place and period names in textual expressions) into geo-spatial coordinates and time-spans. A prototype system, implementing the proposed methods, is described in detail. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed approaches

SPEIR: Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research. Final Project Report: Elements and Future Development Requirements of a Common Information Environment for Scotland

The SPEIR (Scottish Portals for Education, Information and Research) project was funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC). It ran from February 2003 to September 2004, slightly longer than the 18 months originally scheduled and was managed by the Centre for Digital Library Research (CDLR). With SLIC's agreement, community stakeholders were represented in the project by the Confederation of Scottish Mini-Cooperatives (CoSMiC), an organisation whose members include SLIC, the National Library of Scotland (NLS), the Scottish Further Education Unit (SFEU), the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries (SCURL), regional cooperatives such as the Ayrshire Libraries Forum (ALF)1, and representatives from the Museums and Archives communities in Scotland. Aims; A Common Information Environment For Scotland The aims of the project were to: o Conduct basic research into the distributed information infrastructure requirements of the Scottish Cultural Portal pilot and the public library CAIRNS integration proposal; o Develop associated pilot facilities by enhancing existing facilities or developing new ones; o Ensure that both infrastructure proposals and pilot facilities were sufficiently generic to be utilised in support of other portals developed by the Scottish information community; o Ensure the interoperability of infrastructural elements beyond Scotland through adherence to established or developing national and international standards. Since the Scottish information landscape is taken by CoSMiC members to encompass relevant activities in Archives, Libraries, Museums, and related domains, the project was, in essence, concerned with identifying, researching, and developing the elements of an internationally interoperable common information environment for Scotland, and of determining the best path for future progress

Building a Portal for Scientific Collections at the University of Lisbon

Tese de mestrado, Bioinformática e Biologia Computacional, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2020As coleções científicas, reunindo uma enorme quantidade e diversidade de objetos e os dados que lhes estão associados, constituem um valioso património histórico, científico e cultural. Estas coleções estão, geralmente, sob a responsabilidade dos museus e dos seus respetivos curadores, sendo importante que exista uma plataforma sobre a qual os responsáveis das mesmas possam efetuar operações de gestão e de manutenção das mesmas. Atendendo a diversidade das coleções, estes dados, pertencentes a diferentes domínios científicos e com propriedades distintas, colocam problemas de integração, disponibilização e manutenção, problemas estes cada vez mais pertinentes numa realidade que vive de dados e da análise e partilha dos mesmos. Este projeto, centrado neste desafio, pretendeu desenvolver, para o Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência da Universidade de Lisboa, uma plataforma que agregasse as variadíssimas coleções desta instituição, tirando partido de uma plataforma open-source base chamada CollectiveAccess. No decorrer do mesmo, foi desenvolvida uma metodologia generalizada para qualquer coleção que cobre os processos desde a aquisição dos dados, o seu processamento e correção ate a sua importação e disponibilização dentro da plataforma. Foram, também, desenvolvidas e implementadas funcionalidades especificas que visaram resolver determinadas características particulares dos diferentes conjuntos de dados como e o caso da implementação de um sistema hierárquico para dados relacionados com taxonomia, sistema de introdução de dados geográficos utilizando uma API externa e desenvolvimento das funcionalidades de pesquisa de modo a satisfazerem as necessidades de cada conjunto de dados. Estas funcionalidades e o desempenho do sistema foram avaliados através de dois questionários de usabilidade (System Usability Scale), atraves de dois Google Form diferentes. Estes questionários foram direcionados para dois tipos principais de utilizadores do sistema: curadores e publico, em geral. Para alem disto, foram pedidos comentários e sugestões de melhorias ou acrescento de funcionalidades. Os resultados dos questionários foram satisfatórios obtendo-se uma classificação de A e B, por parte dos testes do publico e dos curadores respetivamente, na escala de usabilidade. A analise dos comentários e sugestões também permitiu obter uma ideia sobre possíveis melhoramentos e novas funcionalidades a implementar.With scientific collections bringing together a huge number and diversity of objects and the data associated with them, they constitute a valuable historical, scientific and cultural heritage. These collections are generally under the responsibility of museums and their respective curators, and it is important that there is a platform on which those responsible for them can carry out management and maintenance operations. Given the diversity of the collections, these data, belonging to different scientific domains and with different properties, pose problems of integration, availability and maintenance, problems that are increasingly relevant in a data-centric world that relies on the analysis and sharing of the data. This project, focused on this challenge, aimed to develop, for the Museu Nacional de Historia Natural e da Ciência da Universidade de Lisboa, a platform that aggregates the very diverse collections of this institution, taking advantage of an open-source base platform called CollectiveAccess. In the course of the same, a generalized methodology was developed for any collection, covering the processes from the acquisition of the data, its processing and correction to its import and availability within the platform. Specific features were also developed and implemented that aimed at solving certain particular characteristics of different data sets, such as the implementation of a hierarchical system for taxonomyrelated data, geographic data entry system using an external API and development of the base search features, meeting the requirements for each collection. These functionalities and the overall performance of the system were evaluated through two usability questionnaires (System Usability Scale), via two different Google Forms. These questionnaires were aimed at two main types of users of the system: curators and the general public. In addition, comments and suggestions for improvements or addition of features were requested. The results of the questionnaires were satisfactory, obtaining a classification of A and B, by the tests of the public and the curators, respectively, on the usability scale. The analysis of comments and suggestions also provided an idea of possible improvements and new features to be implemented

Investigating the Effects of Exploratory Semantic Search on the Use of a Museum Archive

Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in how new technologies can support the more effective use of online museum content. Two particularly relevant developments are exploratory search and semantic web technologies. Exploratory search tools support a more undirected and serendipitous interaction with the content. Semantic web technology, when applied in this context, allows the exploitation of metadata and ontologies to provide more intelligent support for user interaction. Bletchley Park Text is a museum web application supporting a semantic driven, exploratory approach to the search and navigation of digital museum resources. Bletchley Park Text uses semantics to organise selected content (i.e. stories) into a number of composite pages that illustrate conceptual patterns in the content, and from which the content itself can be accessed. The use made of Bletchley Park Text over an eight month period was analysed in order to understand the kinds of trajectories across the available resources that users could make with such a system. The results identified two distinct strategies of exploratory search. A risky strategy was characterised as incorporating: conceptual jumps between successive queries, a larger number of shorter queries and the use of the stories themselves to acclimatise to a new set of search results. A cautious strategy was characterised as incorporating: small conceptual shifts between queries, a smaller number of longer queries and the use of composite pages to acclimatise to a set of new search results. These findings have implications for the intelligent scaffolding of exploratory search