Cultural Heritage Information: Access and Management

With the advent of the Internet digital copies of cultural heritage information resources can be accessed anywhere in the world instantaneously without having to consult the originals.

Cultural Heritage Information: Access and Management offers 11 chapters from 18 authors in six countries on the history and influence of digital cultural heritage. Edited by Ian Ruthven (Professor of Information Seeking and Retrieval, University of Strathclyde) and G.G. Chowdhury (Professor of Information Science, Northumbria University), the book covers current research and development in the field and outlines the challenges and trends facing memory institutions.

The book’s introductory chapter by the editors provides an overview of digital cultural heritage information. Digitisation is complex and costly, and such activities are governed by policies and guidelines. Massive digitisation projects exist at national levels, such as American Memory, and international levels, such as the Europeana Digital Library. These organisations have led the way for the administration of cultural heritage.

Subsequent chapters address issues and research regarding policies, infrastructures, access and usability, system implementations and sustainability. The unifying theme throughout the book is that managing rich, hetrogenous digital cultural heritage collections involves a number of challenges beyond digitisation. The information environment is complicated by issues regarding metadata, indexing and information seeking and retrieval. Matters concerning the digital divide, social and legal policies and long-term access also test the cultural and heritage sectors.

Chris Alen Sula (Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Digital Humanities, Pratt Institute) outlines how digital humanities research affects cultural heritage assets. He notes that the digital humanities is more than just accessing artefacts: “Genuine DH work involves more thoroughgoing, transformative interactions with computing technology”. Digital humanities is interdisciplinary, including geographers, computer and information scientists, demographers, engineers, architects and media theorists. Unlike traditional research fields digital humanities is marked by openness, collaboration, collegiality, connectedness, diversity and experimentation. In order to serve this relatively new population information professionals must determine the best ways to make digital heritage assets adaptable for novel research uses and interpretation.

Melissa Terras (Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities, University College London) outlines the development of cultural heritage information resources. She writes, “Project management, and records creation and cataloguing of each digital item, are often more time-consuming than the creation of digital surrogates themselves”. Digitisation and all that it entails is more than technical issues; it is dependent on the institutional and project framework from which it emerges. Terras demonstrates her arguments superbly by discussing recent initiatives at her home institution.

Cultural Heritage Information: Access and Management is for students, researchers and practitioners who want to understand digital heritage’s unique challenges and learn how they have been handled in institutional projects. Throughout time, archives, libraries and museums have acted as guardians of the world’s cultural memory. Our stewardship of digital heritage informs our understanding of cultural inheritance and heralds new horizons for future generations.