Cultural Heritage Informatics and Resource Discovery

The Institute has been engaged in a number of innovative projects that exploit the power of the Internet to enhance access to cultural heritage assets, such as TheGlasgowStory, funded under the NOF-digitise programme, the AHRC funded Glasgow Emblem Digitisation Project, and the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue. TheGlasgowStory was
singled out for praise in the external review of the NOF programme for the methodological advances made in metadata definition and application, workflow, and the design and presentation of interactive and participatory online resources. The Digital Culture Forum (DigiCULT), funded by the EU under FP5, investigated ways to improve the integration of leading edge technology with the cultural heritage sector
across Europe.

Such projects contribute to the study from the user perspective of resource discovery in both the analogue and digital environment domains. Ian Anderson’s investigation of the working practices of academic historians (Primarily History) has attracted considerable attention within the archive community. This has developed into an exploration of the potential for visualising user interfaces employing Zig-Zag structures, initially supported by an AHRC speculative research grant. A prototype has been developed based on rich descriptions from the catalogues of the Glasgow University Archives, the intention is to conduct further research using the prototype as a testbed for exploring using the much larger catalogues of national institutions. As a component in the AX-SNet (Archival eXcellence in Information Seeking Studies Network) group of researchers, this work is contributing to the international development of metrics for archival research and the promotion of user focused archival science.

Ian Anderson and Seamus Ross supervise a doctoral student, Leonidas Konstantelos, investigating the description, cataloguing and retrieval needs of digital art on a larger scale using social-informatics theory. Ross co-supervised Kate Robinson, whose doctoral thesis, which explored the connection between image and the art of science, was published as A Search for the Source of The Whirlpool of Artifice: The Cosmology of Giulio Camillo (Dunedin, 2006).