Exploiting Program Guides for Contextualisation

Archives of cultural heritage organisations typically consist of collections in various formats (e.g. photos, video, texts) that are inherently related. Often, such disconnected collections represent value in itself but effectuating links between 'core' and 'context' collection items in various levels of granularity could result in a 'one-plus-one-makes-three' scenario both from a contextualisation perspective (public presentations, research) and access perspective. A key issue is the identification of contextual objects that can be associated with objects in the core collections, or the other way around. Traditionally, such associations have been created manually. For most organizations however, this approach does not scale. In this paper, we describe a case in which a semi-automatic approach was employed to create contextual links between television broadcast schedules in program guides (context collection) and the programs in the archive (core collection) of a large audiovisual heritage organisation

Audio-visual Collections and the User Needs of Scholars in the Humanities: a Case for Co-Development

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the factors that impede a clear communication and a more fruitful collaboration between humanities scholars and ICT developers. One of the observations is that ICT-researchers who design tools for humanities researchers, are less inclined to take into account that each stage of the scholarly research process requires ICT-support in a different manner or through different tools. Likewise scholars in the humanities often have prejudices concerning ICT-tools, based on lack of knowledge and fears of technology-driven agendas. If the potential for methodological innovation of the humanities is to be realized, the gap between the mindset of ICT-researchers and that of archivists and scholars in the humanities needs to be bridged. Our assumption is that a better insight into the variety of uses of digital collections and a user-inspired classification of ICT-tools, can help to achieve a greater conceptual clarity among both users and developers. This paper presents such an overview in the form of a typology for the audio-visual realm: examples of what role digital audio-visual archives can play at various research stages, and an inventory of the challenges for the parties involved