The management of cultural heritage information has made spectacular advances in the digital era. Institutions are now fully expected to provide digital versions of their holdings. Ambitious resources such as American Memory, Europeana and Trove provide us with an endless wealth of information and an ever-richer array of ways of exploring our heritage. All this richness is not the result of pixie dust, however, and a myriad of problems must be grappled with in designing and managing resources such as these, which Ruthven and Chowdhury outline. They have assembled cutting-edge contributions that address matters such as how to manage cultural heritage information, how to meet the challenges of digitisation, the crucial role of metadata in the construction of a cultural heritage digital library and the economic viability of such a project. Gobinda Chowdhury also gives a useful perspective on the sustainability issues that arise, both social and environmental.
The digital humanities are the next big thing and some significant questions are tackled. How is a service such as Europeana to be analysed and improved? How interactive should cultural heritage resources be? This is a growing bugbear, since some resources seem to be accreting unhelpful user-help, at the risk of smothering the resource. Folksonomy can be far too folksy. More could be said about crowdsourcing, on the other hand, which can achieve remarkable results, although this is only briefly touched on. A chapter by Melissa Terras giving the background to current digitisation practice is particularly good. She quotes William Gibson’s remark that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. In terms of inadequate funding of digitisation projects, Saki’s remark that some cultures ‘make more history than they can consume’ might also be relevant.
The intention of the iResearch Series is to produce research monographs for students, academics and practitioners of information science, and this text with its thorough, detailed referencing reflects this aim. The quality of the papers is high; they repay a close reading, although in such an exciting field perhaps there should be a greater sense of effervescence. But this will be a standard academic work, worth purchasing by institutions specialising in information science. The general reader, even if not deterred by talk of interoperability and meta-metadata, will baulk at its price tag.
Manly Library
© 2015, John MacRitchie
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00049670.2015.1100246