Annual Review of Cultural Heritage Informatics 2012-2013

Citation

Alenka Šauperl (2015), "Annual Review of Cultural Heritage Informatics 2012-2013", Library Review, Vol. 64 No. 3, pp. 266-267. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-01-2015-0005

Annual Review of Cultural Heritage Informatics 2012-2013, edited by Samantha K. Hastings, is a new edition from Facet Publishing. Dr Hastings has been the Director of the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina since 2006. As she describes in her introduction, she is interested in retrieval of digital images, cultural heritage, telecommunications and evaluation of networked information services.

Hastings explains that the mission of the book is “to provide an annual compilation of research and practices” (p. 25) in this quickly developing field. Sharing knowledge about numerous pressing issues in this field should contribute to scientific and professional development and to enhancement of user services.

Sixteen contributions are written by 32 authors. Most chapters are written by two co-authors. The contributions are divided in six parts with different main topic. Each part has an introduction by the editor. I find it interesting that all the abstracts are presented twice. We find the “list of articles by section with abstracts” in the beginning of the book. This approach tells us that the book is intended to be used as a handbook and is very useful. One can quickly assess which of the articles is most relevant for them. Every article also starts with the abstract. All articles are written in the traditional scholarly manner, concisely, with notes and numerous references. A special feature is the back-of-the-book index.

Part one, “Best practices”, brings three chapters. Michele V. Cloonan and Martha Mahard give an introduction to the entire book. Their article “Digital preservation: Whose responsibility?” discusses past and present models of preservation. Traditional models of preservation may not be effective any longer. The authors explore reasons for the shift to new models. Daniel Gelaw Alemneh and Abebe Rorissa review the use of folksonomies in the institutions curating cultural heritage in their chapter “Facilitating discovery and use of digital cultural heritage resources with folksonomies”. Jeanette A. Bastian and Ross Harvey in their chapter “Experiments in cultural heritage informatics” discuss a rather surprising issue: the major challenges for digitization, convergence and digital preservation are not, as we might expect, technological but cultural and professional.

Part two, “Digital communities”, brings two contributions. Hemalata Iyer and Amer J. D’Ambrosio in their article “Web representation and interpretation of culture: The case of a holistic healing system” point to the fact that the universal availability of cultural heritage may also bring misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Jennifer Burek Pierce in her article “Knitting as cultural heritage”, on the other hand, shows that a traditional craft as knitting gets a new boost in social networks. She stresses that this too should be considered cultural heritage.

Part three, “Education”, brings two discussions about education of future cultural heritage curators. Youngok Choi, Mary W. Elings and Jane Zhang in “Developing twenty-first-century cultural heritage information professionals for digital stewardship” describe the development of the program at the Department of Library and Information Science of the Catholic University of America. Rhonda L. Clark and James T. Maccaferri in “Local history and genealogy collections in libraries” show that North American library and information science does not provide adequate education for professionals in local collection management.

Part four, “Field reports”, presents four cases. Abebe Rorissa, Teklemichael T. Wordofa and Solomon Teferra in “Initiatives in digitization and digital preservation of cultural heritage in Ethiopia” present a survey of digital collections and projects in Ethiopia. Alan C. Jalowitz and Steven L. Herb in “Creating the online literary and cultural heritage map of Pennsylvania” present a digital collections that started in 2000 and has been able to develop in many ways in the 13 or 14 years. Sigrid McCausland and Kim M. Thompson in “The community heritage grants program in Australia” present strengths and weaknesses of funding options for digital projects in Australia. Cheryl Klimaszewski and James M. Nyce in “Toward a study of ‘unofficial’ museums” give a description of private museums in Romania, but digital collections are not included.

Part five, “Technology”, presents four different articles, not entirely dealing with technology, as the reader might expect. Heidi Rae Cooley and Duncan A. Buell in “Ghosts of the Horseshoe” describe a mobile application promoting new topics in thinking about the history of the University of South Carolina’s Historic Horseshoe. Walter Forsberg and Eric Piil in “Tune in, turn on, drop out” present a detailed study of the deterioration of VHS collections in libraries and other cultural institutions. Sheila O’Hare and Ashley Todd-Diaz in “The devils you don’t know: the new lives of the finding aid” give a literature review of archival and digital collection finding aid use and development. The same two authors in “If you build it, will they come” present a literature review of digital collections user studies.

In part six, “Reviews”, Carol Lynn Price reviews two books: “The Museum Experience” by Falk and Dierking published in 1992 and their “The Museum Experience Revisited” from 2013.

I must admit that I expected several chapters of literature review on different views on cultural heritage digital collections. But there are also some reports on different topics. The book is an interesting collection of thought on the issue, which might be useful to students and those practitioners who plan a digital collection. As mentioned above, this may be a good handbook.

Contributions are systematically written and easy to read, although fairly small print may cause problems to some of us. Although the editor obviously tried to make the book universal by including Ethiopia, Romania and Australia, there is still a significant American bias. In a field like this, with so many projects everywhere in the world, a geographical bias is unavoidable. Yet many issues are independent of the location and here the book may be quite useful.