=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1509/inv_paper1
|storemode=property
|title=How Digital Cultural Heritage Resources can Lead to New Understandings in the Humanities: Future Challenges for Digital Libraries and Archives
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1509/ITALIA2015_invpaper_1.pdf
|volume=Vol-1509
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/aiia/Agosti15
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==How Digital Cultural Heritage Resources can Lead to New Understandings in the Humanities: Future Challenges for Digital Libraries and Archives==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1509/ITALIA2015_invpaper_1.pdf
How Digital Cultural Heritage Resources can
Lead to New Understandings in the Humanities:
Future Challenges for Digital Libraries and
Archives
Maristella Agosti
Department of Information Engineering, University of Padua, Italy
maristella.agosti@unipd.it
Abstract. This paper reports on the presentation made during the
panel on “Digital Libraries and Digital Archives: Problems and Chal-
lenges for AI Approaches” of the 1st Workshop on Intelligent Techniques
At LIbraries and Archives (ITALIA 2015) co-located with the XIV Con-
ference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, 22 September
2015, Ferrara, Italy1 .
Keywords: digital cultural heritage, digital cultural heritage resources,
digital libraries systems, digital archives systems, interoperable systems,
digital humanities
1 Introduction
Throughout their history, cultural heritage institutions such as libraries and
archives have had two central purposes. They have been charged firstly with
preserving artefacts of cultural significance, and secondly with describing and
cataloguing these artefacts in a way that makes them accessible to a variety of
audiences, from experienced researchers to members of the general public [10].
While the evolution of these roles is not without its challenges, and while the
requirements of preservation and access often stand in direct opposition to each
other, the stable and long-established role of traditional cultural institutions
means that there is general agreement on the responsibilities of institutions, the
processes and procedures by which their work is carried out, and an established
statutory and legislative basis for their work.
The advent of the widespread digitization of cultural heritage collections has
significant implications for institutions that hold these types of collections. The
imperative to preserve unique and delicate resources by producing digital surro-
gates has been, and continues to be, an important driving force for digitization
projects that see the participation of cultural heritage institutions together with
research and industrial organisations experts in computer science.
1
URL: http://italia2015.dei.unipd.it/
Important though preservation undoubtedly is, access is more important still.
As such, computer science can play an important role in contributing to the
creation of the necessary methods for inventing and designing systems able to
manage and preserve digital resources in a way that the systems themselves can
be enjoyed by both non-specialist and specialist users. The different types of
systems of this sort are often named “digital library system” [2] even though
they are mostly focused on digital resources of archives and museums.
2 Creation of New Models and Systems
A new generation of systems that manage and preserve digital resources of cul-
tural heritage is based on methods of active involvement and interaction of dif-
ferent categories of users [1]. Indeed, the active involvement of computer science
experts together with domain experts will contribute to the creation of new
methods useful for the realization of systems and services providing tools that
allow different types of users to interact with these new systems; these new sys-
tems could also provide customizable services that can be adapted to the specific
and diversified needs of users.
The conception and realization of this new generation of management sys-
tems will concern in particular the need to create new models for automating
processes of representing and processing specific cultural heritage resources that
we want to represent and manage in digital form. Depending on the type of
cultural resources, which from time to time can be of specific interest, the design
process of a new model of information management can result from effective
collaboration between experts in the specific domain of cultural heritage and
experts in information and computer science. In fact, the experts in the specific
domain of cultural heritage – such as archives, art history, library science, arche-
ology, linguistics or history – know the history and methods of their specific
domain, while the experts in information and computer science know the story
and methods of computing. In a synergistic relationship for the development of
new methodological solutions, experts in the two sectors may consider the func-
tional and informative requirements as well as the tasks users need to carry out
and come up with new methods and solutions.
The design process then is not limited to the analysis of user requirements
conducted in isolation by the computer science experts. Instead it requires a
synergistic cooperation of the computer scientists together with specialists in
the specific field of cultural heritage of interest. Once the new model has been
created, a corresponding new information management system can be devised.
Computer science then becomes one of the cultures needed to design the new
system, which, through an innovative approach to management, will produce
new knowledge that could not previously be represented or processed.
3 Why New Models and Systems Are Important
We could ask us why we need to devise new models and systems. The answer is
because we want to consider aspects of reality that are more complex than those
that were previously addressed. As we increase the complexity of the aspects of
reality that we want to address and manage, we need new methods and systems
capable of dealing with them and managing them. Bearing in mind the greater
complexity of the aspects of reality that we want to address, we need to devise
methods to match them and systems to manage them.
The first step towards tackling a new aspect of reality, which will be managed
with the help of computer methods, is to highlight the different levels of possible
intervention and divide the overall problem into sub-problems, as is common
when devising a scientific solution for solving a complex problem. The sub-
problems, in the context of information processing systems, are identified and
highlighted by considering the interaction that the system we want to build is
going to have with its users. In fact, the system has to be used by different
categories of users through an interface that has the features and functions that
users need. The interface capabilities are based on internal processing features,
functions and data management information that are usable and manageable.
Consequently, a system of this type is usually represented on three levels:
– the external level, where the interaction takes place between the users and
the presentation layer services provided by the information processing model
designed and manufactured by the system;
– the intermediate level, or logic level of services, where the processing of in-
formation of specific interest to the application that is made available to the
users is carried out; and
– the innermost level, or logic level of the data, where the information of
interest is represented and stored to be made available to the user, possibly
with the aid of permanent storage devices.
One thing to keep in mind when designing and creating a new system of in-
formation management is interoperability. Any system for the management and
preservation of digital resources of cultural heritage does not operate in full “iso-
lation” from other management systems, rather it needs to be “interoperable”
with other management systems of information that are of interest and that can
be related or connected to the new system.
There are several aspects to be taken into account if we want to build in-
teroperable systems and provide qualified services to the final user [5, 6]. The
different aspects that have to be taken into account include some that can be
considered different dimensions of the problem [4]:
– institutions that work together to provide services to users,
– information objects that are represented and that can be enjoyed by the
user,
– functions that are made available,
– interactions between users and systems,
– technologies that are put into play.
Examples of such systems have been made available in recent years in the
context of the SIAR2 and the CULTURA3 projects [3, 6].
4 An Outlook to the Future
If we have correctly applied the new method to create systems suitable for rep-
resenting and managing the various information resources that are of interest to
diversified cultural heritage institutions – such as libraries, archives and muse-
ums both general and specialized – we now have at our disposal a number of
systems that manage the representations of digital resources together with the
information resources themselves.
While these systems become a practice that provide final and experienced
users with those digital collections of information, we have available an amount
of data that is professionally managed and that increases over time. This type
of data is of the sort that is maintained in the so-called “curated databases”,
which require a great deal of human effort to populate and update. The value
of curated databases lies in the organization and the quality of the data they
contain [8].
This increasing quantity of data and related information provides us with
a new way of exploring previously available digital resources together with the
newly related and newly inserted resources. Although these systems have been
designed and developed in line with the previously introduced new vision of
creating digital libraries and archives systems, with the aim of better exploiting
the digital resources managed by the different systems, practices would be needed
that address and manage interoperability among systems at a higher level of
abstraction than what is presently done and in line with what has been proposed
in [7].
When the interoperability at a higher level of abstraction between different
digital libraries and archives systems will be a reality, since most of the sys-
tems would be conceived using the combination of knowledge of the domain
specialist together with knowledge of the computer science specialist, the result-
ing information resources would be richer and similar to those that at present
are available in data-intensive science practice [9]. A hypothesis is that it will
be possible to consider using those sources of information in an innovative way,
because those sources contain data that have been selected and assembled in a
way that can contain verified knowledge on the domain of interest. The study
and correlation of those data will contribute to the discovery of new facts, the
correction of facts previously considered correct, and in general will lead to new
understandings in the area of humanities.
2
URL: http://www.regione.veneto.it/web/cultura/progetti
3
URL: http://www.cultura-strep.eu/
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