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 characteristic and digitization challenges; cultural heritage content organization 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 that have been contributed by seventeen leading academics from six countries. The book begins with an introductory chapter that provides a brief overview of the topic of digital cultural heritage information with the subsequent chapters addressing specific issues and research activities in this topic. The ordering of the chapters moves from scene setting on policies and infrastructures, through considerations of interaction, access and objects, through to concrete system implementations. The book concludes by looking forward to issues around sustainability, in the widest sense, that are necessary to think about in order to maximize 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 digitization 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 know the different research issues and challenges and learn how they have been handled in course of various research projects in these areas.

Professor Ian Ruthven is Professor of Information Seeking and Retrieval, Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Strathclyde.
Professor Gobinda Chowdhury BSc Hons, MSc, PhD, FCLIP is Professor in Information Science at iSchool@northumbria, and Head of the Department of Mathematics and Information Sciences at Northumbria University.