Cultural Heritage on line

The 2nd International Conference "Cultural Heritage online – Empowering users: an active role for user communities" was held in Florence on 15-16 December 2009. It was organised by the Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Library of Congress, through the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program - NDIIP partners. The conference topics were related to digital libraries, digital preservation and the changing paradigms, focussing on user needs and expectations, analysing how to involve users and the cultural heritage community in creating and sharing digital resources. The sessions investigated also new organisational issues and roles, and cultural and economic limits from an international perspective

Share - Publish - Store - Preserve. Methodologies, Tools and Challenges for 3D Use in Social Sciences and Humanities

Through this White Paper, which gathers contributions from experts of 3D data as well as professionals concerned with the interoperability and sustainability of 3D research data, the PARTHENOS project aims at highlighting some of the current issues they have to face, with possible specific points according to the discipline, and potential practices and methodologies to deal with these issues. During the workshop, several tools to deal with these issues have been introduced and confronted with the participants experiences, this White Paper now intends to go further by also integrating participants feedbacks and suggestions of potential improvements. Therefore, even if the focus is put on specific tools, the main goal is to contribute to the development of standardized good practices related to the sharing, publication, storage and long-term preservation of 3D data

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

Digitised content in the UK research library and archives sector

In August 2004, the JISC and CURL Digital Content Creation & Curation Task Force issued an invitation to tender for a study of the current provision of digitised collections for researchers in the UK higher education sector. The objectives of this study were to: 1) Produce a high level survey of digitised material, both already available and in the process of being created, held in UK research collections across all disciplines 2) Survey demand for digitised material and identify gaps in existing provision 3) Develop a mechanism for identifying future digitisation priorities 4) Review funding structures and opportunities and assess possible ways of funding priority areas 5) Recommend standards and formats for future digitisation projects 6) Provide an outline action plan for a national digitisation strategy for the UK research community. JISC and CURL commissioned a team of researchers from the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University to carry out this survey. The study was carried out between 1 November 2004 and 7 March 2005

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

The rise of the citizen curator : participation as curation on the web

From jazz clubs to cheese plates, the term curation has become a signifier of the growing need to organise and prioritise the seemingly endless possibilities of the digital sphere. The issue addressed here is in the associated meanings of the word curation and what it means to be a curator by examining the experience of the curatorial within a discrete context: the Irish curatorial landscape. The word curation comes from the Latin curare, to care for, and has long been associated with the professional duties of those selected as custodians for objects and knowledge deemed to be important to communities, nations, countries or even the world. However, as objects move from being purely physical to the digital, and knowledge changes from being transmitted through similarly physical media to digital formats that can be set free on the Web, what it means to curate has also changed. Curators are no longer necessarily identified as employed within museums or galleries; the word is now also applied to those who engage with and aid in the management and presentation of digital assets online. Curators have emerged in the online space much like their forerunners, bloggers or citizen journalists. We are now seeing the rise of citizen curators on the Web, which has not created these individually motivated curators, but has made their curatorial activities visible. Citizen journalists no longer need to have a printing press or publishing house to communicate with their audience; similarly, citizen curators do not need a private cabinet of curiosities or a job in a museum to allow them to curate or exhibit to an audience.The aims of this research are threefold: to examine the current terminology related to curation by those who identify as curators or engage in curation in Ireland; to define what it means to be a curator or a citizen curator within the Irish context; and to investigate the changing nature of exhibition spaces contained in the Irish context in light of the Web and digital spaces. The study will take the form of an autoethnography, exploiting my unique position within the museum and open knowledge community in Ireland to examine current understandings of curation and the phenomenon of the citizen curator. The focus will be on my work within Wikimedia Community Ireland (WCI), a branch of the Wikimedia Foundation which promotes the use of Wikipedia in Ireland in education, culture, and open knowledge. As an autoethnographer, I can act as an intermediary, part way between those working in cultural organisations and the public involved in knowledge building projects. The study will look at how those engaged in curation articulate the work they do by means of interviews and participant observation. These sources will allow for the development of a spectrum of curatorial practice.The spectrum will arise from the participants’ (both citizen curators and those working in Irish cultural institutions) own understanding and definitions of curation and what it means to curate. In placing these definitions of curation within a spectrum that takes in broader understandings of curatorial practice, the newer forms of digital curation, and a picture of how the citizen curator relates to these methods, will emerge. The disruptive effect which the digital, and in particular the concept of the Long Tail, has brought to bear upon understanding of the assembling, storing, and using of collections will be examined. It will answer many of the issues surrounding the discipline-specific definitions of curation and the curator while informing their relationship with each other. By drawing out curation into a spectrum, what unfolds is the movement of curation from a traditional and closed system of learnt practices, to one which is formed around more open and accessible conventions of curation. In identifying the citizen curator, their role in the larger curatorial debate can be acknowledged and better incorporated into the multitude of online curated projects. This hinges on the emergence of the Do It With Others ethos which pervades both online and offline creative communities, and it redefines curation from a solitary practice, to one which is demarcated by its participatory nature

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation

The 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES) was held on November 2-6, 2015 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA. There were 327 delegates from 22 countries. The program included 12 long papers, 15 short papers, 33 posters, 3 demos, 6 workshops, 3 tutorials and 5 panels, as well as several interactive sessions and a Digital Preservation Showcase