Academic libraries collect process and preserve and provide access to unique collections insupport of teaching, learning and research. Digitisation of local history collections has beenundertaken as a way to preserving fragile materials and promoting access. On the other hadsocial networking tools provide new ways of providing access to various collections to awider audience. The purpose of the study was to explore how local history collections arepromoted using social media in Uganda. An environmental scan of cultural heritageinstitutions in Uganda with a social media initiative was conducted. A case study of HistoryIn Progress Uganda project is reported in the paper. The project is chosen based on the levelof activity and ability to provide different approaches and practices in using social mediaplatforms. Findings revealed varying levels of activity. Nevertheless, there still existchallenges of promoting access to local history collections. The paper offers insights into thenature and scope of activity in promoting local history collections in Uganda.
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The web is widely used by museums as a low-barrier platform to inform people on activities in the museum and publish their collections online. It is not uncommon that this publishing consists of an simple web interface connected to a database that holds records with limited information about the artifacts; information that is more relevant for managing the collection than for informing a wider public. It is not uncommon for a description to have no reference at all to that what is visible in the picture. Moreover this situation is hardly a worst-case scenario. In the Netherlands over 20 million artifacts in museums await a description, artifacts that do have a (scanty) description only half of them is available digitally. Four museums in the Netherlands (Naturalis, Museon, University Museum Utrecht, Dutch Institute of Image & Sound) together with three research and knowledge institutes (University of Applied Science Utrecht, Novay, BMC Group) decided in 2008 to explore the potential of user groups tagging collections and the effects of this on the involvement of these people towards the museum. For this purpose a dedicated social tagging tool was developed and implemented: www.ikweetwatditis.nl
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The research described in this paper provides insights into tools and methods which are used by professional information workers to keep and to manage their personal information. A literature study was carried out on 23 scholar papers and articles, retrieved from the ACM Digital Library and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA). The research questions were: - How do information workers keep and manage their information sources? - What aims do they have when building personal information collections? - What problems do they experience with the use and management of their personal collections? The main conclusion from the literature is that professional information workers use different tools and approaches for personal information management, depending on their personal style, the types of information in their collections and the devices which they use for retrieval. The main problem that they experience is that of information fragmentation over different collections and different devices. These findings can provide input for improvement of information literacy curricula in Higher Education. It has been remarked that scholar research and literature on Personal Information Management do not pay a lot of attention to the keeping and management of (bibliographic) data from external documentation. How people process the information from those sources and how this stimulates their personal learning, is completely overlooked. [The original publication is available at www.elpub.net]
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This episode of The Void was written and hosted by Rosa Menkman. It is concerned with the changing role of the library, reading, writing and publishing in a post-digital age. The performance/lecture was based on a presentation at the BiblioTech event, reworked for the Institute of Network Cultures. This is the shortened version, edited by Rosa Menkman. There is also a full version available.Rosa Menkman is a Dutch research based artist working in the field of resolution studies.BiblioTech is a project exploring the changing role of the library, reading, writing, and publishing in a post-digital age.The BiblioTech conference was facilitated by Nathan Jones and Sam Skinner of Torque Editions and was hosted by NeMe Arts Centre in Limassol, Cyprus. The lecture/performance took place on May 10, 2022.
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In January 2008 the online photo-hosting site Flickr introduced a new section entitled The Commons. Its two key goals were to show the hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives to the general public and to give Flickr community members the opportunity to contribute and describe these photos in order to enrich these collections. Surprisingly enough, little empirical research has been done on the actual usage of The Commons by the institutes and Flickr members. In our research we harvested a rich data sample over a 14-week period: 196,822 photos with user-generated content of 1.3 million tags, almost 130,000 comments and more than 22,000 notes. In total, 165,401 members from 188 different countries actively “did something” with the photos. This presentation will analyze this large data sample. In addition to the quantitative findings, we will discuss the qualitative findings regarding the content analysis of tags and comments.
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Collecting local memories on-line is a growing practice with participatory elements on different levels. Three levels of participation – micro, meso and macro – are introduced by describing an exemplary case: the Memory of East in Amsterdam. These levels of this particular case can be grounded in the statements of the Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. This indicates that the Memory of East case might be a good practice. However, looking at 53 other cases shows that the three levels are present, but designed differently with respect to the degree in which residents participate. Since the convention is not specific enough we choose the notion of cultural citizenship to assess the value of cases like these. We claim that the cases that have more focus on ordinary residents participating on all three levels assures a sustainable and self-feeding system, which is the best answer to the goals of the convention.
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Full text via link. This paper focuses on the use of online social tagging and storytelling to enrich digital collections of cultural heritage. Together with several Dutch museums, we examined the question of whether and how social tagging could benefit these museums in disclosing specific digital collections. This led to the development of a social tagging tool (www.ikweetwatditis.nl) as a means of researching behaviour when tagging cultural objects. The results show that tagging and storytelling can help museums enrich their collections and involve their audiences.
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This publication gives an account of the Public Annotation of Cultural Heritage research project (PACE) conducted at the Crossmedialab. The project was carried out between 1 January 2008 and 31 December 2009, and was funded by the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science. Three members of the Dutch Association of Science Centres (Vereniging Science Centra) actively participated in the execution of the project: the Utrecht University Museum, the National Museum of Natural History (Naturalis), and Museon. In addition, two more knowledge institutes participated: Novay and the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences. BMC Consultancy and Manage¬ment also took part in the project. This broad consortium has enabled us to base the project on both knowledge and experience from a practical and scientific perspective. The purpose of the PACE project was to examine the ways in which social tagging could be deployed as a tool to enrich collections, improve their acces¬sibility and to increase visitor group involvement. The museums’ guiding question for the project was: ‘When is it useful to deploy social tagging as a tool for the benefit of museums and what kind of effect can be expected from such deployment?’ For the Crossmedialab the PACE project presented a unique opportunity to conduct concrete research into the highly interesting phenomenon of social tagging with parties and experts in the field.
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All Gone is a series of experiments with AI that build on existing collections of climate fiction to create much-needed new climate imaginaries. As the climate crisis is also a “crisis of imagination” (Ghosh, 2016), this project turns to the art genre that is best at forecasting and imagining alternative futures: science fiction. Using collections of ‘cli-fi’ novels, in which science fiction meets natural disaster or heavy weather, algorithms are trained until they are able to render new climate imaginaries in textual and visual form. The edited texts and curated images are further developed into audio stories and a tarot deck as tools for reflection on present and future living with a changing climate.
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Website version of archival platform set up as research tool and research dissemination tool, publishing digitised photo collections and reflecting on them in blog section of the website.
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