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The study aims, based on the symbiotic relationship between tourism agencies and various stakeholders, to investigate what “policy-level” partners would advise their “practice-level” counterparts on, first, how the World Heritage Site (WHS) status of monuments can be made attractive for travellers, and second, what steps can be taken by stakeholders to enhance the WHS tourist experience.

A qualitative approach involving e-mail interviews was adopted. Content analyses of open-ended exploratory questions put to “policy-level” respondents yielded 10 major themes that can enhance the brand appeal of the WHS.

The findings offer in-depth solutions for better trip experiences of Heritage Tourists. Insights from the responses under ten thematic areas have direct relevance for application by tourism and hospitality facilitators.

Although this study was conducted in India, its findings hold implications for practice throughout the world. They could similarly be incorporated as elements of policy directed at incentivising communication of the value of preserving heritage for future generations.

While previous research focused on stakeholders for planning and policy making, this study explores the stakeholder's perspective for a more comprehensive understanding of how using the WHS brand can generate more holistic tourism development.

The purpose of this paper is to overview the current state of affairs of the Indian heritage treasures, which are being identified, restored, preserved and promoted by various organizations at national and international levels with an emphasis on its documentation aspect. Lack of information about the heritage sites, structures and its significance, especially unprotected and unidentified, leads to its permanent loss. One of the prominent measures to safeguard from such irrevocable cultural deprivation is its documentation. Further, the study aims to examine the significant challenges associated with identifying unrevealed heritage assets of the country in the context of its preservation, documentation and promotion. As a suggestive measure, the study aims to propose the need for developing a comprehensive cultural heritage register assisted with technological aids focusing on community participation in taking stock of the heritage items they possess and enable them to effectively document.

The present study extracts the cultural heritage data available with the UNESCO belongs to Indian heritage assets inscribed in its World Heritage portal. The collected data has been analyzed and interpreted to overview the country's recognition at the global level. The data collected from the official portal is further explored and customized to have a lucid account. The details about the organizations and institutions working on heritage conservation and preservation activities in India are also collected. A review of published literature on the related areas has also been performed to identify the issues and challenges associated with the documentation of heritage assets to support this study. The study also included the researcher’s experience in working with cultural heritage documentation.

India holds a substantial quantity of cultural as well as natural heritage items. However, an exhaustive effort to document them at the national level is not being accomplished to its full potential. Many of the assets, inheritances or sites of cultural importance have not been fully identified, preserved or documented; hence, it is unrecalled forever once lost. Some organizations and individuals working on cultural heritage lack clarity in its function and do not follow any common standards in its documentation. For any conservation activity, documentation is prime, and the local community's support is also essential. Means of international collaboration for managing and promoting the heritage are required to be encouraged. Findings of the study demand the need for utilizing digital technologies to assist the documentation process. It emphasizes the requirement of having a web-based single window online gateway where an individual or community can dispense the knowledge and resources they possess hence contributing to heritage conservation, preservation and sustainability.

The study limited to Indian scenario and the data on the heritage sites are collected from UNESCO's World Heritage portal. Only the documentation and promotional aspects of the cultural heritage are discussed. There are many lesser-known and unprotected cultural heritage in different parts of the country with artistic value. The unique characteristics that have not been recorded anywhere are to be documented systematically to reduce the frequency and severity of losses. The implication of the study highlights the present scenario of cultural heritage documentation in India and the need for a comprehensive heritage information gateway supported with a register facility to precisely document and retrieve.

Aspects of culture which are inherited from the past to the present are to be preserved for future generations. Digital archives of cultural heritage and the use of digital tools to document them are effective mechanisms to protect and store the data on endangered heritage items. For any such conservation effort, documentation is its first step. Developing and facilitating access to an exclusive database of cultural heritage at risk boast its sustainability and can be enriched by the involvement of local communities. Public access to such a database would greatly support administrators, tourist departments, culture departments, development administration and conservation activists to gather the details of unprotected heritage items of the country, its present condition, risk of damage, etc. which further helps in its preservation, conservation, sustainability and promotion in a constructive manner.

To the authors' best knowledge, no such single and comprehensive mechanism in the country allow the individuals to contribute to the inventory list holding information about the identified, unprotected and unidentified heritage assets which are having a risk of damage, threat, decay, vulnerable, neglect, lack of use or inappropriate maintenance and development. Developing such a system with technological and data infrastructure helps to pool all the cultural heritage resources under one umbrella. It imparts the value and significance of protecting and promoting heritage inheritances and a safe haven of them from the risk of its chronic loss. The system can also support all the activities related to heritage protection and bring the local community to timely support and initiate such heritage conservation activities.

Marketing Management and Economics.

Management courses (MBA level), Courses on Tourism

When in India (WII) is a tour company serving the niche segment of Heritage tourism. WII was incorporated in 2011 with the aim to enable foreign and domestic tourists to experience the deeply embedded cultural ethos and heritage of Old Delhi. Their unique tourism product, “the Wonder Pedicabs”, provides leisure rickshaw rides through the Old Delhi lanes. This teaching case focuses on various managerial dimensions of the operations of WII. The case can be used in courses on Marketing as well as Economics. The case discusses the macro and micro environmental forces operating on WII. It deliberates on the economics of various tours offered by WII. It also educates the participants about the process of decision-making that goes into the selection of a tour operator and a tourism product. Hence, it appreciates the significance of need recognition, search for information, evaluation of alternatives and purchase decision as pillars in the process of decision-making process. The case also attempts to educate the participants about the Indian Tourism Sector.

Comprehend what constitutes a tourism product and types of tourism. Understand consumer decision-making for a tourism product. Highlight the importance of the tourism sector in the Indian economy. Discuss economic concepts pertaining to cost and volume, enabling managerial decision-making.

Teaching Notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes.

CSS 12: Tourism and Hospitality.

Tourism and hospitality have had a dynamic role in different countries and became the mainstay of the economy. Tourism, if proliferated appropriately, supports countries to accrue the benefits of the industry. Considered to have multiplier effects, tourism banks on visitors who come to a host country from other countries or are domestic visitors who move around the country. Countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, India and the Maldives have depended on Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTA) for several years. More the FTAs, the higher the benefits. India too had the facet of promoting the country as a tourist destination to the world and inviting them to be part of the tourism juggernaut. Unfortunately, the metrics are not in line with the quality of destinations in India compared to the FTAs in Thailand, the Maldives or even in Singapore. With a black swan event like the twenty-first century COVID-19 pandemic, many countries focus on domestic travellers, so does India. Just before the pandemic, several plans and policies encouraging domestic travel made their way along with the promotion of quality tourism globally with a lesser number of Overseas Tourism Offices (OTO). The Federal Government in India, in a strategic manner, ensured that domestic travel and FTAs would happen in tandem. It was done through robust global tourism promotion through the India Missions and OTOs that ensured a positive growth trajectory and the metrics that provided the ammunition for economic growth. The research team also got to interview former officers of the Ministry of Tourism, Government of India and players from the private sector that have played a role in the sectoral business operations.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the status of digitization of manuscripts in India and to give suggestions to transcribe these manuscripts easily, effortlessly and expeditiously.

The study is based on the analytical study of the literature available on global efforts in respect of documentation, preservation, conservation and digitization of manuscripts with special emphasis on the efforts of “namami” (acronym for National Manuscript Mission) for Indian manuscripts.

Meticulous analysis of literature and case studies give an overview of the diverse practices of public participation/crowd collaboration to transcribe and tagging of the rare and old historical documents around the globe. However, Indian libraries are far behind in adopting such practices.

India has a very rich cultural, educational and research heritage preserved in the form of manuscripts. These thousands of manuscripts are significant source of knowledge base for many researchers, however, despite their heritage value, these remain inaccessible to the researchers because of their being scattered and unpublished form. Moreover, even the digitized manuscripts remain difficult to use by the researchers because of immense linguistic diversity and scripts. Documentation and digitization of these manuscripts will not only preserve the invaluable heritage of India but also will enable their easy and vast access by the researchers globally. With the rapid growth in digital information and web-based technology, galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) around the world encourage and engage public participation in various digitization projects to enrich and enhance their digital collections and place them on the web. However, Indian GLAM still refrains to accept and adopt such practices. Thus this paper will encourage and motivate the Indian GLAM to expedite their digitization and uploading them on web for tagging and transcribing.

This is an original paper and has great implementation value. During the study enormous literature was available on digitization of Indian manuscripts. However, not even a single study could be found on tagging and transcription of these manuscripts, specifically crowd contribution in this area. Hence, the paper, by presenting the evidences of crowd participation for the tagging and transcription of manuscripts globally, proposes the Indian GLAM to exploit the benefits of this practice for Indian manuscripts also in order to expedite the tagging process to enhance their usage.

The study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of search interfaces of Swedish online museum collections, focussing on search functionalities with particular reference to subject searching, as well as the use of controlled vocabularies, with the purpose of identifying which improvements of the search interfaces are needed to ensure high-quality information retrieval for the end user.

In the first step, a set of 21 search interface criteria was identified, based on related research and current standards in the domain of cultural heritage knowledge organization. Secondly, a complete set of Swedish museums that provide online access to their collections was identified, comprising nine cross-search services and 91 individual museums' websites. These 100 websites were each evaluated against the 21 criteria, between 1 July and 31 August 2020.

Although many standards and guidelines are in place to ensure quality-controlled subject indexing, which in turn support information retrieval of relevant resources (as individual or full search results), the study shows that they are not broadly implemented, resulting in information retrieval failures for the end user. The study also demonstrates a strong need for the implementation of controlled vocabularies in these museums.

This study is a rare piece of research which examines subject searching in online museums; the 21 search criteria and their use in the analysis of the complete set of online collections of a country represents a considerable and unique contribution to the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval of cultural heritage. Its particular value lies in showing how the needs of end users, many of which are documented and reflected in international standards and guidelines, should be taken into account in designing search tools for these museums; especially so in subject searching, which is the most complex and yet the most common type of search. Much effort has been invested into digitizing cultural heritage collections, but access to them is hindered by poor search functionality. This study identifies which are the most important aspects to improve.

Based on the highlights of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's collection, the purpose of this paper is to examine the similarities and differences between the subject keywords tags assigned by the museum and those produced by three computer vision systems.

This paper uses computer vision tools to generate the data and the Getty Research Institute's Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) to compare the subject keyword tags.

This paper finds that there are clear opportunities to use computer vision technologies to automatically generate tags that expand the terms used by the museum. This brings a new perspective to the collection that is different from the traditional art historical one. However, the study also surfaces challenges about the accuracy and lack of context within the computer vision results.

This finding has important implications on how these machine-generated tags complement the current taxonomies and vocabularies inputted in the collection database. In consequence, the museum needs to consider the selection process for choosing which computer vision system to apply to their collection. Furthermore, they also need to think critically about the kind of tags they wish to use, such as colors, materials or objects.

The study results add to the rapidly evolving field of computer vision within the art information context and provide recommendations of aspects to consider before selecting and implementing these technologies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine issues associated with user engagement on social media with local history in the North East of Scotland and to focus on a case study of the Buckie and District Fishing Heritage Society, a small but very successful and professionally-run community-based local heritage organisation.

A qualitative approach using photo elicitation on social media was deployed in conjunction with analysis of the user interactions and the reach insights provided by Facebook to the page manager. Additionally, a focus group was used.

The research, although focussed on an individual case study, offers significant lessons which are more widely applicable in the local history and cultural heritage social media domain. Key aspects include user engagement and how digital storytelling can assist in the documentation of local communities ultimately contributing to local history research and the broader cultural memory. The significance of the image and the photo elicitation methodology is also explored.

The research demonstrates new opportunities for engaging users and displaying historical content that can be successfully exploited by community heritage organisations. These are themes which will be developed within the paper. The research also demonstrates the value of photo elicitation in both historical and wider information science fields as a means of obtaining in-depth quality engagement and interaction with users and communities.

The research explored the underutilised method of photo elicitation in a local history context with a community possessed of a strong sense of local identity. In addition to exploring the benefits of this method, it presents transferable lessons for how small, community-based history and heritage organisation can engage effectively with their audience.

After reviewing cultural heritage institutions; crowdsourcing initiatives and tension between univocal and multivocal views of those who interact with cultural expressions, this paper argues that to support vibrant and effective crowdsourcing communities while ensuring the quality of the work of crowdsourcing project volunteers it is essential to reevaluate and transform the traditional univocal, top-down approach to representation and organization. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This conceptual paper applies Foucault’s power–knowledge construct and theories of representation to the processes and practices employed in cultural heritage crowdsourcing projects.

Viewed through the Foucauldian lens, cultural heritage professionals are regarded as active parts of the power–knowledge relationship due to their direct engagement in the representation, organization and dissemination of knowledge, exercised not only through the traditional role of cultural heritage institutions as gatekeepers of knowledge but, more importantly, through the power of representation and organization of the cultural heritage.

This paper provides a theoretical understanding of cultural heritage crowdsourcing initiatives and proposes a framework for multivocal representation of cultural heritage expressions in which the voices of volunteers have the same validity as the voices of cultural heritage professionals.

The purpose of the paper is to present a study which exploited synergies between the fields of Heritage BIM, conservation and building translocation to develop a new approach to support a digitally enabled translocation process. The translocation (or relocation) of buildings or structures is a niche area of the construction sector and much of the significant work in this field has focused on the relocation of heritage buildings. However, hitherto there was a paucity of work between translocation and the process and technology of BIM.

The study employed a constructive research approach to analyse the phenomenon of heritage translocation. As part of this approach, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with professionals engaged in heritage translocation projects within the UK, and this was supported by a multi-faceted review of literature within the cross cutting themes of translocation and HBIM. Building on the results, a BIM-enabled process was implemented to support the translocation of a 19th-century timber framed building in the UK.

Following analysis of results of semi-structured interviews and supported by findings from prevailing literature in the field of translocation and HBIM, a HBIM for Translocation Conceptual Framework (TransHBIM) was developed. Building on the key constructs of the framework, a HBIM-based workflow was implemented to develop a digitally enabled translocation process, which provided a new approach to managing and documenting heritage translocation where disassembly and reconstruction are utilised. The workflow provided a more effective way of documenting individual elements of the building within a digital environment opening up potential for new simulation of the entire process.

Current approaches to translocation involve traditional/manual methods of recording the building and cataloguing the key heritage elements for all aspects of the process. This new approach implements BIM technologies and processes along with the use of barcode or RFID tags to create a digital bridge between the physical elements of the building and the BIM database. This provides more accurate recording of the heritage and also opens up opportunities to support the process with additional digital simulation techniques enhancing the efficiency of the entire process.