WORKSHOP REPORT

Information Access to Cultural Heritage
ECDL 2008, Aarhus Denmark, 18 September 2008
Martha Larson
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
m.a.larson@uva.nl

Kate Fernie
Kate Fernie Consulting, UK.
kfernie@tiscali.co.uk

Johan Oomen
Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision,Netherlands.
JOomen@beeldengeluid.nl

Juan Miguel Cigarran Recuero
UNED, Spain.
juanci@lsi.uned.es

Abstract
The workshop on Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH 2008) was held during the ECDL
conference in Aarhus on the 18th September 2008. The workshop provided a venue to bring togetheracademics carrying out research in the area of information access and practitioners working in thecultural heritage field. The aim was to encourage the exchange of ideas concerning the creation,curation, storage, retrieval and use of cultural heritage information. The day began with a keynote paperby Chris Batt, who looked to the future, challenging the audience to think of uses of technology to makesense of the landscape for users, shifting focus of information access to cultural heritage from search tofind. The keynote was followed by a session on the European Digital Library with invited papers by
Stefan Gradmann on the infrastructure of Europeana and by Rob Davies on work to develop the contentof the Library in the EuropeanaLocal project. The proceedings continued with a series of papers onservices being developed to provide access to cultural heritage collections and a wide range of media −images, text, music and speech. A lively series of poster boasters followed and the day concluded withthe poster session and a panel discussion on future directions. Given the attendance at the workshop andthe good level of discussion throughout the day, we conclude that Information Access to Cultural
Heritage is a growing area of research and promising area for exchange and collaboration between
researchers and practitioners.

1 Introduction
The workshop on Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH) was held during the ECDL
conference in Aarhus on the 18th September 2008. The workshop provided a venue to bring together
academics carrying out research in the area of information access and practitioners working in thecultural heritage field. The aim was to encourage the exchange of ideas concerning the creation,curation, storage, retrieval and use of cultural heritage information.
This report gives a summary of the workshop, starting with an overview and then continuing with adescription of each of the workshop sessions and of the panel session that concluded the workshop.

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Further information, as well as the proceedings [7] of the workshop, are available on the workshop
website , Accessed 07-10-08.

Europeana Infrastructure, S. Gradmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
EuropeanaLocal — Its Role in Improving Access to Europe's Cultural Heritage
through the Europeana service of the ‘European Digital Library,’ R. Davies (MDRPartners)
Enabling Semantic Access to Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Tate Online. P.
Clough, J. Marlow, N. Ireson (University of Sheffield)
Enigma Helvetia: Promoting an Exhibition through Multiple Channels, N. Di Blas(Politecnico di Milano), E. Rubegni (University of Lugano), P. Paolini (Politecnicodi Milano)
Having Triplets — Holding Cultural Data as RDF, K. Byrne (University ofEdinburgh)
Access to the Music of Man Archive: The MARIMBRO System, A. Schneidt (Logica),
K. Klenke (Hanover University of Music and Drama) T. Mandl (University ofHildesheim), J. Medinvil, R. Vogels (Hanover University of Music and Drama), C.
Womser-Hacker (University of Hildesheim)
Towards Affordable Disclosure of Spoken Word Archives, R. Ordelman, W. Heeren,
M. Huijbregts, D. Hiemstra, F. de Jong (University of Twente)
Table 1: Oral presentations at the IACH 2008 workshop
The IACH 2008 workshop was sponsored by the EU IST-FP6 Project MultiMatch:
Multilingual/Multimedia Access To Cultural Heritage. The workshop program consisted of oral andposter presentations of papers selected from the submissions received in response to the workshop callfor papers. Submissions were reviewed by 15 experts from academia and cultural heritage institutions
who were invited to serve on the programme committee. Chris Batt was invited to give a keynote
speech, and delivered a talk entitled ‘Building Bridges to Knowledge.’ Presentations on Europeana [2]and EuropeanaLocal [3] were also invited. The oral presentations of the workshop are listed in Table 1
and the poster presentations in Table 2. The rest of this workshop report is devoted to giving anoverview of the topics addressed in the sessions of the workshop and the panel discussion at the end of
the workshop.

2 Workshop presentations
2.1 Keynote: What do you want the future to be like?
Chris Batt (former chief executive of the UK’s Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) began his
keynote by asking the audience what they wanted the future of information access to be like andcontinued by focussing on the need to improve services for users. He described the current environmentas ‘the land of the informed bewildered’ where users search into an unknown world and spoke about theimportance of making sense of the landscape and enabling users to go beyond the shop window

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presented by search engines into the deep web. Batt challenged the audience to ‘think find and notsearch’ and to envision applications of technology that support users in their discovery of cultural
heritage resources instead of focussing on sophisticated search techniques.

An Intelligent Service Orieneted approach for Improving Information Access in
Cultural Heritage, A. Baruzzo, P. Casoto, P. Challapalli, A. Dattolo (University ofUdine)
Providing linked-up access to Cultural Heritage Data, T. Blanke, M. Hedges (King'sCollege London)
Multimedia Retrieval in MultiMatch: The Impact of Speech Transcript Errors on
Search Behaviour, J. Carmichael, P. Clough (University of Sheffield), G. Jones, E.
Newman (Dublin City University)
A System Architecture for Conveying Historical Knowledge to Museum Visitors, D.
Dannells (University of Gothenburg)
Feasibility of a European Registry of Standards for Digital Heritage, M. de Niet
(DEN: Digitaal Erfgoed Nederland)Marking Up Cultural Materials for Time and Geography, F. Gey, R. Shaw, R.
Larson, M. Buckland, B. Pateman, D. Melia (University of California Berkeley)
Searching for Linguistic Phenomena in Literary Digital Libraries, F. SánchezMartinez, M. L. Forcada, R. C. Carrasco (Universitat d'Alacant)Table 2 Poster presentations at IACH 2008

2.2 Digital cultural heritage: European initiatives
The papers in the ‘Digital Cultural Heritage: European initiatives’ session focussed on current work tobuild the European Digital Library, a flagship initiative of the European Commission’s i2010 agenda.
Stefan Gradmann began by describing the political background and timeline for building Europeana, thefirst prototype of Europe’s Digital Library, Museum and Archive. Gradmann went on to describe thetechnical infrastructure for Europeana, which builds on work by TEL, Minerva, MICHAEL, EDLNet,DELOS, BRICKS, QVIZ and other EU-funded projects. The current project will create a single-accesspoint to 6 million digital objects from libraries, museums and archives. Gradmann described theEuropeana first prototype as a catalogue-based portal that will hold index files and object surrogates,
pointing users to the digital objects held by cultural institutions via simple qualified Dublin Coremetadata. Gradmann presented an overview of plans for future Europeana prototypes with additional
functionality, the semantic resources needed and the potential for interactive services. Rob Davies built
on Gradmann’s presentation, describing the EuropeanaLocal project, which aims to provide support tolocal cultural institutions in making their digital content available to Europeana. Davies reported that apreliminary survey of the content available from the institutions involved in the EuropeanaLocal project
had identified 20 million items, which will be made available to Europeana via a network of regional
aggregators. Davies noted that the project aims to demonstrate the importance of content available fromlocal and regional institutions for the European Digital Library. He concluded by remarking on theACM SIGIR Forum92Vol. 42 No. 2 December 2008

importance of geography in finding content interesting to a locality or region, calling for additional
geographic search functionality in future Europeana prototypes.

2.3 Cultural heritage exhibitions and collections
After the break, Paul Clough reported on research on semantic work to facilitate finding, integrating andconnecting cultural heritage information based on a case study of Tate Online. The research project
included a user evaluation study to inform the design of a prototype interface by identifying important
information facets for the Tate’s audiences. An interesting aspect of the project was work undertaken toextend the Getty’s Union List of Artist’s Names (ULAN) by integrating it with details of additional
artists identified through the Tate’s collections. Clough reported on difficulties in dealing withcontradictory data, for example differences in the expression of an artist’s date or place of birth in thedifferent datasets. The Tate Collection prototype is now available online.
Paolo Paolini went on to talk about the concept of ‘Instant Multimedia’ and the rapid development of
websites to accompany museum exhibitions. Paolini described the case study of the ‘Enigma Helvetica’exhibition, which was about contrasting views of Swiss culture. The accompanying website offeredusers a chance to explore this ‘strange and complex exhibition’ through a series of audio-visual topics.
Paolini reported that the methodology allowed for the development and delivery of multimedia
presentations within 30 days and was now being used by curators and school groups to develop newresources. The research also looked at the frequently asked question of whether such websites stimulate
people to visit museum exhibitions in person, finding that people were visiting the Enigma Helvetica
website both before and after seeing the exhibition.
The final paper in this session was ‘Having Triplets’ by Kate Byrne. Byrne described her research
project into the conversion of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of
Scotland’s (RCAHMS) database to RDF format. She described the benefits of conversion to RDF bothin terms of enabling access to the hidden web, by revealing the content of databases to web crawlers,and in terms of the potential to connect data from different sources. Byrne’s work on conversion of theRCAHMS database included experimentation with automated tools. Having estimated that this would
produce an astonishing 235 million triples, Byrne concluded that there was a need for simplification.
With schema knowledge and by avoiding literals, Byrne concluded that it was possible to reduce thenumber of triples by tenfold.

2.4 Access to Cultural Heritage Multimedia
After lunch the focus of the workshop was on providing access to multimedia formats. Christa WomserHacker began by talking about the MARIMBRO System, which provides access to the Music of Man
archive at the University of Hildesheim and Hanover University of Music and Drama. The collection,
which is currently in the process of being digitised, includes a wide range of materials relating to theethnology of music – ranging from instruments to recordings of performances, videos and books.
Specialists have developed various systems for classifying this sort of material, for example based on theinstruments, the playing method, place and so on. The novelty behind the MARIMBRO system is that it
offers multi-facetted ontologies and allows for switching between the facets. Womser-Hacker reported
that integration of the different ontologies was challenging and required the involvement of experts inthe field of music ethnology. Future developments for the system include looking at collaboration withusers via social tagging.
The final paper was given by Roeland Ordelman, who described research into techniques aiming tosupport the affordable disclosure of spoken word archives. Ordelman reported that there had been a shift
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in recent years from the use of laboratory data, such as benchmark evaluations of speech, to models
based on real world data. He described the surprises and difficulties of working with live interviews, forexample hesitations, accents and background noise. The archive collections worked with included radio
interviews with the Queen of the Netherlands made during the Second World War and interviews with
Dutch survivors of the Second World War camp at Buchenwald. Ordelman reported that the speech ofsome individuals was particularly difficult to understand, increasing the difficulty of training speech
recognition models and developing systems to automatically transcribe their speech. Current research is
focussing on understanding the errors and tuning speech recognition systems to improve results. In thefuture, plug-and-play systems may become available but for the present Ordelman reminded theaudience that it is currently cheaper to employ people to transcribe small speech archives.

2.5 Poster Session
Following poster boasters, workshop participants had the opportunity to speak to the presenters during a
lively poster session. The posters covered a wide range of topics relating to information access in thecultural heritage (cf. Table 2) including, for example, research on marking up cultural materials tosupport retrieval based on time and geography presented by Fred Gey of the University of California,Berkeley. The EU-funded MultiMatch project presented some of its research into the impact of speech
recognition errors on search behaviour. Marco de Neit of Digital Heritage Nederlands presented a posterthat called for the establishment of a European standards registry for the digital heritage.

3 Panel Discussion
The workshop concluded with a panel session, which had four discussants: Marco de Niet (DEN: Digital
Heritage Netherlands), Joyce Ray (IMLS: Institute of Museum and Library Services, USA), Richard
Wright (BBC Archives, UK) and Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands).
The session opened with the panel being asked the question: ‘Which technologies have been importantfor information access to the cultural heritage and which will continue to be important?’ The panellists
approached this question in different ways, with Marco de Niet beginning by highlighting on thecoordinated actions, which, in recent years, have increased momentum in bringing cultural heritage
collections and institutions on line. While de Niet and Joyce Ray focussed on user issues, Maarten deRijke and Richard Wright spoke about the technologies and the importance of making catalogues
available. De Rijke suggested that, given the massive volume of data we are dealing with, we need togive up on top down structuring and exploit bottom-up and statistical approaches. He also mentioned theimportance of open tools, citing as an example the semantic annotation services made available by OpenCalais. Chris Batt contributed to the discussion from the floor, highlighting the emergence oftechnologies that are enabling users to combine resources, for example combining images from Flickr tocreate a three-dimensional picture or model of a building such as Notre Dame [6]. De Niet noted theimportance of user-based criteria to drive developments from the beginning.
The next question asked the panel to consider whether there are actually technologies that hinder
information access to cultural heritage, picking up on earlier discussion on copyright and IPR. Joyce
Ray suggested it would help if technologies were more widely available that make it possible to discover
if something is in the public domain; Richard Wright mentioned ways forward: exploiting the large ofamount of factual material in the public domain and making maximum use of permissible digests andexcerpts for copyrighted material.
Paul Clough asked the panel if users are ‘experiencing information overload.’ A discussion followed
which focussed on content and trust, with Richard Wright beginning by noting that the ‘low volume, low
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interest market is the saviour of many archives.’ Joyce Ray mentioned the risk that ‘content is here today
and gone tomorrow’ and championed libraries and archives as being vital for maintaining collections in
the long term. Marco de Niet continued by noting the importance of user-generated content, which isoften of high quality, alongside the content from cultural institutions. Kate Byrne contributed to thediscussion from the floor noting the importance of provenance in terms of assessing the trust-worthinessand authoritativeness of material. De Niet noted that authority is the driving force of Europeana.
Chris Batt described quality as an opportunity, as something to aspire to. He warned of the danger ofapplying different standards on-line and in the real world – suggesting that institutions sometimes
require their on-line data to be more perfect than their real-world collections. Following on from theearlier discussion about user generated content, which included systems that enable users to contributeanswers and judge each other's answers mentioned by Maarten de Rijke, the question of preservation ofthis additional content was raised from the floor.
The panel discussion concluded with a call for the audience and cultural heritage institutions to facehead-on upcoming challenges, e.g., ‘go out there and prepare for public access’ and to support
accessibility and interoperability by making use of open source software and open standards.

4 Conclusion
The IACH 2008 workshop proved to be a very successful venue in which to bring together practitioners
and academic researchers to discuss new research and new developments in information access for thecultural heritage. The workshop was well attended with ca. 40 participants from Europe, Canada, theUSA, India, Sri Lanka, New Zealand and Australia. Another notable feature of the workshop was thebreadth of the research topics being reported on, including specialized technologies under development,
which in the future are likely to co-exist in information access systems for the cultural heritage. We
concluded that organising such a workshop to bring together people with different specialities andexperiences offers a valuable opportunity to exchange knowledge and build a foundation for future
research and development in the area of information access to cultural heritage.

5 References[1] Clough, P., Marlow, J., Ireson N., Tate Collection, University of Sheffield prototype,
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~nsi/tate-collection.html, Accessed 07-10-08.
[2] Europeana, http://www.europeana.eu, Accessed 07-10-08.
[3] EuropeanaLocal, http://www.europeanalocal.eu, Accessed 07-10-08.
[4] Flickr, http://www.flickr.com, Accessed 07-10-08.
[5] IACH 2008 Website, http://ilps.science.uva.nl/IACH2008, Accessed 07-10-08.
[6] Knight, W., Holiday snapshots used to model the world in 3D. New Scientist Tech.
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12846-holiday-snapshots-used-to-model-the-world-in3d.html, Accessed 07-10-08.
[7] Larson, M., K. Fernie, J. Oomen and J. Cigarran (eds.), Proceedings of the ECDL 2008 Workshop on
Information Access to Cultural Heritage, Aarhus, Denmark, September 18, 2008, ISBN 978-90-8134891-1.
[8] MultiMatch: Multilingual/Multimedia Access To Cultural Heritage, http://www.multimatch.eu,
Accessed 07-10-08.
[9] OpenCalais. http://www.opencalais.com, Accessed 07-10-08.

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