Digitally Archiving Architectural Models and Exhibition Designs: The Case of an Art Museum

[Excerpt] In 2013, a medium-sized art museum located in the Northeast United States received a grant to plan for an electronic records repository. This museum will be referred to here as USAM for brevity. Working as the electronic records consultant on this project, the first major task was to research and inventory the electronic records being created and already existing at the museum, which necessitated scans of network storage, focus groups with departmental staff, and investigations of media included in the physical archives. In engaging in this research process, certain document types were expected, such as image files, word processed documents and spreadsheets. Although documents of these types were indeed plentiful, an extensive quantity of digitally produced two-dimensional drawings (2D) and three-dimensional models (3D) were found. Specifically, over 37,000 CAD drawings were unearthed during a network storage inventory project, as well as over 6,000 3D models. These files originate primarily in VectorWorks (and its predecessor MiniCAD), AutoCAD, and Rhinoceros. Given the quantity of digitally produced models and drawings existing at USAM, and the need to plan for an electronic records repository, this project is motivated by the following question: By what methods can two-dimensional CAD drawings (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) models be digitally archived for long term preservation and access? To answer this question, a review of the relevant literature is first presented, which explores the methods that have been developed for archiving architectural models and exhibition designs. Second, the study methods are presented, which include more detail on the context as well the archiving tests that were conducted. The paper concludes with results and conclusions regarding how architectural models and exhibitions designs are archived at USAM

PRESERVING THE VERNACULAR POSTINDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE: BIG DATA GEOSPATIAL APPROACHES TO HERITAGE MANAGEMENT AND INTERPRETATION

Redundant historical industrial sites, or postindustrial landscapes, face numerous preservation challenges. Functionally obsolete, and often derelict and decaying, these cultural landscapes often retain only a fraction of their original infrastructure. With their historical interconnections made indistinct by their physical separation and obscured by the passage of time, surviving remnants are isolated and disjunct, confounding both their legibility and their consideration for formal historic preservation. Nevertheless, they persist. This dissertation presents a theoretical understanding of the nature of postindustrial landscape preservation, and argues that the material persistence of its historical constituents is the result of previously overlooked processes of informal material conservation, here termed vernacular preservation. Further, this dissertation examines ways that heritage professionals can manage and interpret these vast, complex, and shattered landscapes, using 21st-century digital and spatial tools. Confronted by ongoing depopulation and divestment, and constrained by limited financial capacity to reverse the trend of blight and property loss, communities and individuals concerned with the preservation of vernacular postindustrial landscapes face many unique management and interpretation challenges. The successful heritagization of the postindustrial landscape depends on its comprehension, and communication, as a historically complex network of systems, and I argue that utilizing advanced digital and spatial tool such as historical GIS and procedural modeling can aid communities and heritage professionals in managing, preserving, and interpreting these landscapes. This dissertation presents heritage management and interpretation strategies that emphasize the historical, but now largely missing, spatial and temporal contexts of today’s postindustrial landscape in Michigan’s Copper Country. A series of case studies illustrates the demonstrated and potential value of using a big-data, longitudinally-linked digital infrastructure, or Historical GIS (HGIS), known as the Copper Country Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (CC-HSDI), for heritage management and interpretation. These studies support the public education and conservation goals of the communities in this nationally-significant mining region through providing accessible, engaging, and meaningful historical spatiotemporal context, and by helping to promote and encourage the ongoing management and preservation of this ever-evolving postindustrial landscape

Expressing the tacit knowledge of a digital library system as linked data

Library organizations have enthusiastically undertaken semantic web initiatives and in particular the data publishing as linked data. Nevertheless, different surveys report the experimental nature of initiatives and the consumer difficulty in re-using data. These barriers are a hindrance for using linked datasets, as an infrastructure that enhances the library and related information services. This paper presents an approach for encoding, as a Linked Vocabulary, the "tacit" knowledge of the information system that manages the data source. The objective is the improvement of the interpretation process of the linked data meaning of published datasets. We analyzed a digital library system, as a case study, for prototyping the "semantic data management" method, where data and its knowledge are natively managed, taking into account the linked data pillars. The ultimate objective of the semantic data management is to curate the correct consumers' interpretation of data, and to facilitate the proper re-use. The prototype defines the ontological entities representing the knowledge, of the digital library system, that is not stored in the data source, nor in the existing ontologies related to the system's semantics. Thus we present the local ontology and its matching with existing ontologies, Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) and Metadata Objects Description Schema (MODS), and we discuss linked data triples prototyped from the legacy relational database, by using the local ontology. We show how the semantic data management, can deal with the inconsistency of system data, and we conclude that a specific change in the system developer mindset, it is necessary for extracting and "codifying" the tacit knowledge, which is necessary to improve the data interpretation process

Digital long-term preservation, provenance and linked open data

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Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

Managed Forgetting to Support Information Management and Knowledge Work

Trends like digital transformation even intensify the already overwhelming mass of information knowledge workers face in their daily life. To counter this, we have been investigating knowledge work and information management support measures inspired by human forgetting. In this paper, we give an overview of solutions we have found during the last five years as well as challenges that still need to be tackled. Additionally, we share experiences gained with the prototype of a first forgetful information system used 24/7 in our daily work for the last three years. We also address the untapped potential of more explicated user context as well as features inspired by Memory Inhibition, which is our current focus of research.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, preprint, final version to appear in KI - K\"unstliche Intelligenz, Special Issue: Intentional Forgettin

Digital Library Evaluation: Toward an Evolution of Concepts

published or submitted for publicatio