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Heritage buildings are significant for their historical and architectural value. Due to the lack of rating systems designed specifically for heritage buildings, it is essential to develop and validate a heritage building assessment tool that considers its specific characteristics. The purpose of this study is to provide an extensive review of research on Sustainability of Heritage Buildings (SHBs).

This review highlights methodologies applied in SHBs research and analyzes major global rating systems in order to identify their deficiencies for SHBs assessment. A systematic review was employed and articles from the top 10 high impact factor journals were studied. Twelve major global rating systems and their assessment criteria were identified.

Significant variability was observed among the assessment tools since each tool assesses several criteria, factors and indicators that fit its local context. Part of this variability can also be seen in the rating scales, threshold values and accreditation titles. As a result, the final sustainability ranking for a given building cannot be compared among the 12 rating systems. Most importantly, these systems fail to analyze some factors such as energy that are considered important with respect to heritage building assessment.

Since no specific rating system could be identified in this review as the most appropriate for heritage buildings, a new sustainability assessment tool that is specific to heritage buildings should be developed. Such a tool will enable facility managers to evaluate and improve the sustainability of their heritage buildings while preserving them.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the new Technical Report ISO 28118 “Performance measures for national libraries”.

The paper reports on the mission and main tasks of national libraries as defined by the technical report, and describes some 30 performance indicators including indicators that are specifically relevant to national libraries. The paper also explains the process by which indicators were selected and tested.

The rationale for the establishment of a new standard is examined and perspectives offered on its envisaged application and further development.

This paper gives an informative preview of the Technical Report which, at the time of writing, is in the process of being published. It serves as a useful introduction to the report for those who may wish to adopt the standard in future, and whilst primarily aimed at national libraries it is potentially relevant for regional libraries with similar tasks and missions.

This paper aims to explore a theoretical and methodological approach to preservation management in libraries, relying on the basic presumption that preservation is a complex and comprehensive process that involves many different and seemingly diverse aspects whose efficiency lies in preservation management.

Using a case study of Croatia, the paper describes a methodology for exploring the general preservation management context and presents a preservation management model that comprises five key components.

The paper offers insight into preservation management issues in a specific national context.

Although this paper focuses primarily on written heritage in libraries, it is applicable to other types of heritage and to other types of information institutions.

The theoretical and methodological approach presented in this paper and described in the example of Croatia can be useful for exploring similar issues in other countries. It can be expanded to other types and forms of heritage and heritage institutions.

The paper describes a model of organising preservation activities into an efficient and successful preservation system, and establishes a methodology for exploring diverse preservation issues on national and institutional levels.

Over the past 20 years, heritage inventories in Flanders (Belgium) have evolved from printed books to digital inventories. The purpose of this paper is to look at this evolution and highlight the interaction between the system and its users.

After a short introduction about the history of inventories in Flanders, this paper mainly concerns itself with the last decade. Discrete topics will be highlighted to show the effects of the interaction that has taken place.

It is obvious that a system that publishes a digital inventory needs to adapt to the user requirements. But, after years of working with a digital inventory system, it has become apparent that not only has the system been developed to the users’ needs, but also that user practice and the resulting data have been shaped by the system. Seeing data projected on a common basemap has led researchers to realise how intertwined and interdependent different types of heritage can be and how much their respective methodologies can benefit from more interaction. It has become apparent that data quality is of the utmost importance, something that can only be guaranteed by data entry standards, validation tools, and a strict editing workflow. The systems that are being developed are not expected to live on forever, but the data in them is.

This paper presents real-life use cases and practical applications of building and maintaining a large digital inventory system over the years and through changes in organisational structure and focus. It provides insights that are hard to ascertain from smaller projects due to the volumes of data that are handled.

The purpose of this paper is to study the cultural integration, the role of national libraries in regional and international cooperation, Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) national libraries’ barriers of cooperation and drivers of their cooperation and to propose a framework (conceptual and operational) for their cooperation.

Data collection tool of this survey was a researcher-made questionnaire, sent to 30 individuals and experts involved in cooperation of ECO National Libraries from eight institutions. The reliability of the questionnaire was calculated using Cronbach’s alpha. It was 0.91. In this study, for awareness of activities between ECO national libraries and extraction of drivers, some documents were studied, and preliminary data were collected by informal interviews with meeting stakeholders and participants.

The lack of stability in management positions was one of the major barriers in cooperation of the ECO national libraries. Other major obstacles in this context were lack of continuous communication, lack of common protocols and standards, lack of planning, lack of a central coordinating organization, bureaucracy, etc. Geographical proximity, common history and heritage, common resources, Islamic and cultural factors, importance of information and knowledge, requirements of the international system and political and security requirements were considered as drivers. An information centre was proposed for their active cooperation. Iran is better to host the information centre.

National libraries as the scientific and cultural memory of nations and heirs of written heritage should cooperate and share their valuable scientific and cultural heritage to the future generations.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a general review and historical context for digitization and interdisciplinary research involving digital surrogates of historical Persian manuscripts in the National Library and Archives of Iran and similarly engaged institutions.

The paper explores interdisciplinary aspects of Persian art, poetry, science, and philosophy, as revealed in the scrutiny of digitized manuscripts. It explores the enhancement of Persian, Iranian and Islamic cultural heritage research. It discusses benefits and concerns in conceptual contexts of library and information science literature. It references some manuscript digitization projects involving Islamic heritage, including the HARAM online manuscript service of the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI). It addresses issues of availability and access in global contexts.

Manuscript digitization, placed in the context of interdisciplinary research, reveals modern correlations to the interdisciplinary nature of ancient Persian arts and sciences — and to the purpose of digitization — as appropriate to an historical continuum of Persian written literacy and traditional Islamic cultural heritage.

For future contexts of digital global research, research involving many interrelated fields will benefit from use of digital manuscript surrogates. Institutional cooperation will be necessary. The physical conservation of fragile materials also benefits. Historical contexts should be observed, and preserved with the materials.

This paper shows that interdisciplinary research in international universities, libraries, museums, archives, government agencies, and other public institutions uniquely benefits from access to digitized manuscripts. It provides contexts for solving problems of physical manuscript decay and destruction.

An overview of the current use of handwritten text recognition (HTR) on archival manuscript material, as provided by the EU H2020 funded Transkribus platform. It explains HTR, demonstrates Transkribus, gives examples of use cases, highlights the affect HTR may have on scholarship, and evidences this turning point of the advanced use of digitised heritage content. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper adopts a case study approach, using the development and delivery of the one openly available HTR platform for manuscript material.

Transkribus has demonstrated that HTR is now a useable technology that can be employed in conjunction with mass digitisation to generate accurate transcripts of archival material. Use cases are demonstrated, and a cooperative model is suggested as a way to ensure sustainability and scaling of the platform. However, funding and resourcing issues are identified.

The paper presents results from projects: further user studies could be undertaken involving interviews, surveys, etc.

Only HTR provided via Transkribus is covered: however, this is the only publicly available platform for HTR on individual collections of historical documents at time of writing and it represents the current state-of-the-art in this field.

The increased access to information contained within historical texts has the potential to be transformational for both institutions and individuals.

This is the first published overview of how HTR is used by a wide archival studies community, reporting and showcasing current application of handwriting technology in the cultural heritage sector.

This article aims to introduce the special issue of the journal Facilities on “World Heritage cities management”, together with the respective articles.

This introduction addresses the topic of world Heritage cities management and its relevance to science and society. In so doing, it indirectly points to the emerging field of cultural heritage management within facilities management.

Even though the management of cultural heritage assets is nothing new for facilities managers, cultural heritage management as a field of research can be considered at a younger stage of development than other related studies, such as the discipline of architectural conservation, which originated in the nineteenth century with the advent of modernity. The application of management practices to immovable cultural heritage assets emerged as recently as the 1990s. At a time in which the role of culture and heritage in processes of sustainable development is gaining more ground, this special issue can be seen as the first of more contributions to come, which aim to enhance the conservation and management of cultural heritage assets for the benefit of present and future generations.

This paper aims to make a contribution to the growing field of cultural heritage management and is of use to facilities managers, scholars and consultants who have responsibilities but limited knowledge in this field.

To counteract processes of landscape deterioration, marginalisation and loss of cultural heritage due to rural restructuring of farming in late-modern Norwegian society, an agricultural landscape scheme started up in 2009. The purpose of this paper is to examine the way this recently introduced strategy of directing particular resources to a group of selected agricultural landscapes contributes in instigating integrated landscape management and to gain insight in the role cultural heritage play.

The authors ask how potential conflicts between local interpretations of cultural heritage and the assessments made by authoritative heritage managers are expressed in the initial planning documents.

While the reasoning and selection of the two areas are strongly influenced by the authoritative heritage discourse, the agricultural landscape scheme is nonetheless open to local adaptations and adjustments, and the two plans vary both in form and contents due to the major stress put on active involvement of farmers to render long-term management feasible.

Examination of the role cultural heritage plays is part of a larger research project where problems related to biodiversity, legal implication and public participation are dealt with separately.

The study will provide important results for future adjustments and potential enlargement and has transfer value to conservation schemes in other European countries.