Cultural Heritage Information

This book provides an overview of various challenges and contemporary research activities in cultural heritage information, focusing particularly on the cultural heritage content types, their characteristics, and digitisation challenges. It also explores cultural heritage content organisation and access issues, users and usability, as well as various policy and sustainability issues associated with digital cultural heritage information systems and services.

Cultural Heritage Information, the first book in the peer-reviewed i-Research series, contains eleven chapters contributed by seventeen leading academics from six countries. The book begins with an introductory chapter that offers a brief overview of digital cultural heritage information, with subsequent chapters addressing specific issues and research activities within this topic. The chapters are ordered to progress from policies and infrastructures, through considerations of interaction, access, and objects, to concrete system implementations.

The book concludes by considering sustainability issues, in the broadest sense, necessary to maximise the availability and longevity of our digital cultural heritage. The key topics covered are:

• Managing digital cultural heritage information
• Digital humanities and digital cultural heritage (alt-history and future directions)
• Management of cultural heritage information: policies and practices
• Cultural heritage information: artefacts and digitisation technologies
• Metadata in cultural contexts – from manga to digital archives in linked open data environment
• Managing cultural heritage: information systems architecture
• Cultural heritage information users and usability
• A framework for classifying and comparing interactions in cultural heritage information systems
• Semantic access and exploration in cultural heritage digital libraries
• Supporting exploration and use of digital cultural heritage materials: the PATHS perspective
• Cultural heritage information services: sustainability issues

Readership: This will be essential reading for researchers in Information Science, specifically in the areas of digital libraries, digital humanities, and digital culture. It will also be useful for practitioners and students in these areas who want to understand the different research issues and challenges and learn how they have been addressed over the course of various research projects in these fields.