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This paper aims to explore the accelerations and constraints libraries, archives, museums and heritage organisations (“collections-holding organisations”) face in their role as collection data providers for digital infrastructures. To date, digital infrastructures operate within the cultural heritage domain typically as data aggregation platforms, such as Europeana or Art UK.

Semi-structured interviews with 18 individuals in 8 UK collections-holding organisations and 2 international aggregators.

Discussions about digital infrastructure development often lay great emphasis on questions and problems that are technical and legal in nature. As important as technical and legal matters are, more latent, yet potent challenges exist too. Though less discussed in the literature, collections-holding organisations' capacity to participate in digital infrastructures is dependent on a complex interplay of funding allocation across the sector, divergent traditions of collection description and disciplinaries’ idiosyncrasies. Accordingly, we call for better social-cultural and trans-sectoral (collections-holding organisations, universities and technological providers) understandings of collection data infrastructure development.

The authors recommend developing more understanding of the social-cultural aspects (e.g. disciplinary conventions) and their impact on collection data dissemination. More studies on the impact and opportunities of unified collections for different audiences and collections-holding organisations themselves are required too.

Sustainable financial investment across the heritage sector is required to address the discrepancies between different organisation types in their capacity to deliver collection data. Smaller organisations play a vital role in diversifying the (digital) historical canon, but they often struggle to digitise collections and bring catalogues online in the first place. In addition, investment in existing infrastructures for collection data dissemination and unification is necessary, instead of creating new platforms, with various levels of uptake and longevity. Ongoing investments in collections curation and high-quality cataloguing are prerequisites for a sustainable heritage sector and collection data infrastructures. Investments in the sustainability of infrastructures are not a replacement for research and vice versa.

The authors recommend establishing networks where collections-holding organisations, technology providers and users can communicate their experiences and needs in an ongoing way and influence policy.

To date, the research focus on developing collection data infrastructures has tended to be on the drive to adopt specific technological solutions and copyright licensing practices. This paper offers a critical and holistic analysis of the dispersed experience of collections-holding organisations in their role as data providers for digital infrastructures. The paper contributes to the emerging understanding of the latent factors that make infrastructural endeavours in the heritage sector complex undertakings.

Despite being an authentic carrier of various cultural practices, the human body is often underutilised to access the knowledge of human body. Digital inventions today have created new avenues to open up cultural data resources, yet mainly as apparatuses for well-annotated and object-based collections. Hence, there is a pressing need for empowering the representation of intangible expressions, particularly embodied knowledge within its cultural context. To address this issue, the authors propose to inspect the potential of machine learning methods to enhance archival knowledge interaction with intangible cultural heritage (ICH) materials.

This research adopts a novel approach by combining movement computing with knowledge-specific modelling to support retrieving through embodied cues, which is applied to a multimodal archive documenting the cultural heritage (CH) of Southern Chinese martial arts.

Through experimenting with a retrieval engine implemented using the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (HKMALA) datasets, this work validated the effectiveness of the developed approach in multimodal content retrieval and highlighted the potential for the multimodal's application in facilitating archival exploration and knowledge discoverability.

This work takes a knowledge-specific approach to invent an intelligent encoding approach through a deep-learning workflow. This article underlines that the convergence of algorithmic reckoning and content-centred design holds promise for transforming the paradigm of archival interaction, thereby augmenting knowledge transmission via more accessible CH materials.

Losing indigenous knowledge is to lose the future and impoverish the societies because indigenous knowledge is considered one of the cornerstones and survival of communities, societies and economies. This study, thus, aims to explore and assess the contextual enablers of indigenous knowledge and their role in developing and sustaining the Ewe communities in Ghana.

The qualitative research design, which enabled the researcher to engage the participants in an interview process and observation, was used in this study. It was augmented with a quantitative design using structured questions. Data analysis was guided by the basic principles of grounded theory. The coding system was aided by NVivo to analyze the qualitative data, while the quantitative data was analyzed using the SPSS. Descriptive analysis and graphs were deployed in the presentation of the findings.

The study discovered that the communities are in possession of several types of indigenous knowledge, ranging from tacit to explicit knowledge, which are embedded in their cultural and traditional systems and unique to every community; the culture of trust among the citizens and motivation to create and share knowledge in communities was high. Same time, family heads, farmer groups, libraries and museums played key roles in the preservation and management of indigenous knowledge in the communities. On the other hand, information officers and institutions like churches and police posts played insignificant roles in the management and preservation of knowledge in the communities just as the absence of a culture of willingness by the community members to create and share knowledge. Additionally, there was an absence of technological infrastructure, platforms, databases and policies to aid the management and preservation of knowledge in the communities. The study concludes that indigenous knowledge plays a vital role in the development and sustainability of communities in Ghana.

Community leaders and political leaders need to invest in systems and structures that will promote the management and preservation of indigenous knowledge for the development of the communities and the state as a whole.

The study demonstrates its originality in terms of scope, setting, population and empirical evidence by focusing on the role of indigenous knowledge in the sustainability and development of Ewe communities in Ghana.

Community-generated digital content (CGDC) is one of the UK’s prime cultural assets. However, CGDC is currently “critically endangered” (Digital Preservation Coalition, 2021) due to technological and organisational barriers and has proven resistant to traditional methods of linking and integration. The challenge of integrating CGDC into larger archives has effectively silenced diverse community voices within our national collection. Our Heritage, Our Stories (OHOS), funded by the UK’s AHRC programme Towards a National Collection, responds to these urgent challenges by bringing together cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science.

Existing solutions to CGDC integration, involving bespoke interventionist activities, are expensive, time-consuming and unsustainable at scale, while unsophisticated computational integration erases the meaning and purpose of both CGDC and its creators. Using innovative multidisciplinary methods, AI tools and a co-design process, previously unfindable and unlinkable CGDC will be made discoverable in our virtual national collection.

There currently exists a range of disconnected, fragile and under-represented community-generated heritage which is at increasing risk of loss. Therefore, OHOS will work to ensure the survival and preservation of these nationally important resources, for the future and for our shared national collection.

As we dissolve barriers to create meaningful new links across CGDC collections and develop new methods of engagement, OHOS will also make this content accessible to new and diverse audiences. This will facilitate a wealth of fresh research while also embedding new strategies for future management of CGDC into heritage practice and training and fostering newly enriching, robust connections between communities and archival institutions.

The purpose of this study is to provide the challenges and sustainability of Sarawak's cultural heritage and archaeotourism.

The research method practiced is a qualitative descriptive approach using primary, secondary and field research sources.

The study found that the challenges faced by cultural heritage in Sarawak are the need for human resource expertise, research funding, documentation and reporting, aesthetic value and loss of sites, standard research procedures, bureaucratic processes, vandalism, natural threats, collection management and urbanization and modernization. Therefore, the proposed resolution to address the stated challenges is uniformity and professionalism, archaeotourism and public engagement.

The sample size for this study may be limited due to the nature of the case study. The findings may not reflect the perspectives of all stakeholders involved in cultural heritage management in Sarawak. Future studies could use larger sample sizes to capture a more diverse range of perspectives.

The practical implications of this study provide valuable insights for stakeholders involved in cultural heritage management, including government agencies, NGOs and local communities. By incorporating the findings into their practices, stakeholders can promote sustainable cultural heritage management and contribute to sustainable development.

The social implications of this study highlight the potential for cultural heritage management to contribute to social and economic development, community empowerment and the preservation of cultural identity and diversity. By incorporating the findings into their practices, stakeholders can promote inclusive and sustainable cultural heritage management practices that benefit local communities and contribute to the broader social and cultural fabric of society.

The originality and value of this study lie in its detailed and nuanced case study approach, interdisciplinary perspective, emphasis on sustainability and community involvement and practical recommendations for improving cultural heritage management practices.

This study aims to delve into the effectiveness of applying traditional and more advanced digital means to document elements of cultural heritage, in this case large-format cartography. Application of multimethod digitalisation to a school map of the American continent dating to the early part of the 20th century has served to address specific issues, notably its multilayers consisting of paper, inks and a protective varnish on a textile medium. Its large format is likewise an obstacle to its digital capture.

The method applied here resorted to three registration systems: single-shot photography, panoramic photography and photogrammetry. The first two widely serve to capture works of large-format, whereas the third is commonly used to record volumetric assets. A variety of parameters were applied, notably different focal lengths, capture methods and processing software. The images obtained in each case were subjected to qualitative and quantitative comparisons so as to analyse their differences in terms of resolution and accuracy when compared to the map's real measurements, key criteria when duplicating cartographic documents.

Although the final products gleaned from the digital photographs, panoramic photographs and photogrammetry fulfil the basic functions required to record documents housed in archives, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions, this study highlights new advances and complementary functions stemming from certain of these techniques.

Digitalisation is a tool that serves to register, preserve, disseminate and analyse cultural heritage. However, some of the available techniques have rarely been applied specifically to graphic and documentary artefacts. It is for this reason that this study intends to demonstrate their utility in the detailed study of this heritage typology. Moreover, optimising the school map into a digital form favours its dissemination and remote consultation while simultaneously minimising direct manipulation, hence improving its long-term preservation.

Recent archiving and curatorial practices took advantage of the advancement in digital technologies, creating immersive and interactive experiences to emphasize the plurality of memory materials, encourage personalized sense-making and extract, manage and share the ever-growing surrounding knowledge. Audiovisual (AV) content, with its growing importance and popularity, is less explored on that end than texts and images. This paper examines the trend of datafication in AV archives and answers the critical question, “What to extract from AV materials and why?”.

This study roots in a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of digital methods and curatorial practices in AV archives. The thinking model for mapping AV archive data to purposes is based on pre-existing models for understanding multimedia content and metadata standards.

The thinking model connects AV content descriptors (data perspective) and purposes (curatorial perspective) and provides a theoretical map of how information extracted from AV archives should be fused and embedded for memory institutions. The model is constructed by looking into the three broad dimensions of audiovisual content – archival, affective and aesthetic, social and historical.

This paper contributes uniquely to the intersection of computational archives, audiovisual content and public sense-making experiences. It provides updates and insights to work towards datafied AV archives and cope with the increasing needs in the sense-making end using AV archives.

This paper focuses on image-to-text manuscript processing through Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), a Machine Learning (ML) approach enabled by Artificial Intelligence (AI). With HTR now achieving high levels of accuracy, we consider its potential impact on our near-future information environment and knowledge of the past.

In undertaking a more constructivist analysis, we identified gaps in the current literature through a Grounded Theory Method (GTM). This guided an iterative process of concept mapping through writing sprints in workshop settings. We identified, explored and confirmed themes through group discussion and a further interrogation of relevant literature, until reaching saturation.

Catalogued as part of our GTM, 120 published texts underpin this paper. We found that HTR facilitates accurate transcription and dataset cleaning, while facilitating access to a variety of historical material. HTR contributes to a virtuous cycle of dataset production and can inform the development of online cataloguing. However, current limitations include dependency on digitisation pipelines, potential archival history omission and entrenchment of bias. We also cite near-future HTR considerations. These include encouraging open access, integrating advanced AI processes and metadata extraction; legal and moral issues surrounding copyright and data ethics; crediting individuals’ transcription contributions and HTR’s environmental costs.

Our research produces a set of best practice recommendations for researchers, data providers and memory institutions, surrounding HTR use. This forms an initial, though not comprehensive, blueprint for directing future HTR research. In pursuing this, the narrative that HTR’s speed and efficiency will simply transform scholarship in archives is deconstructed.

As museums and other memory institutions continue to invest considerably in mass-digitising collections and participating in large search portals, it is essential to understand existing and potential users, their motivations and search needs to inform collections’ documentation. In this article, we discuss insights from a collaborative project with National Museums Scotland, set up to enhance the findability of collection images and inform documentation practices by understanding the collections users and their search terms.

The research involved interviews with National Museums Scotland staff, users and non-users of the Museums’ Search our Collections portal encompassing a concept mapping and card sort activity; online surveys and content analysis of user search queries.

The project revealed that participants are interested in searching the online collections by terms often not represented in collections metadata, including terms related to identity (their own but also others’) and social context (e.g. through seasonal and social events); emotional and sensory interests (e.g. visual characteristics) and narrative themes (e.g. on under-represented histories).

Based on the findings, we further theorise the semantic gap in online museum collection metadata. To bridge this gap and cater to how users search, we argue for a paradigm shift in documentation practices: suggesting practitioners should not only view collection images as information but also tap into their rich potential for enabling social and affective connections.