Collecting Cultural heritage in a Virtual Setting

Leo Bellino, a student in Knowledge Organization posted this on his class blog and Professor Pattuelli thought it would be of interest here as well.

Everybody that enjoys going to the museum to view the art and artifacts that document a cultures achievement might be interested in the Virtual Afghan Museum of History and Culture. In a country like Afghanistan where a physical museum might be a target for terrorism, it becomes critical to devise a way for Afghan’s to access these documents in a setting that will not compromise the continued preservation of tangible and priceless artifacts. A virtual museum with digital documents and virtual artifacts is an innovative solution to Afghanistan’s unique situation.

http://www.afghanculturemuseum.org/project/index.php

Doodle Poll for Initial Project Groups

I have set-up the Doodle poll to sign-up for groups for at least this
first research phase of the project. As mentioned in class, one group
will research and evaluate folklore archives, the second metadata
schemas, and the third interfaces,search services, and tools. The goal
is to see what is out there and begin evaluating these areas in terms
of the needs of our project.

Here is the link: http://www.doodle.com/4vm29riwpg6pg88y

Email me at prattga@gmail.com if you have any problems/questions.

Welcome to the Spring LIS 670 Student Blog

Hi everyone! This is where you’ll be able to post any links, tidbits, and other information that you find related to the course and want to share. You can also post questions and comment on each other’s posts. Don’t forget to tag your posts! If you have any questions or are having trouble using the blog, just send me an email at prattga@gmail.com.

Welcome Spring 2011 Students!

Welcome to the Student Discussion Blog for LIS 670, Cultural Heritage: Description and Access! On this blog, students will discuss topics and issues related to the course, post questions, share observations and resources, as well as share information about projects and upcoming initiatives.

To access the class site, where you will find the syllabus, course schedule and more, please go to http://lis670.wordpress.com/

Here is my post for the resource that I posted last week for the make up class:

The Variable Media Network is a project that was developed in ‘98 by a curator at the Guggenheim Musuem and is now being further developed by the Daniel Langlois Foundation. I think that this resource is an amazing solution to cataloging and preserving conceptual and experimental works.

According to the Guggenheim website the software used to catalogue does not consider the media used to create the works and their physical components but rather the works behavioral chacteristics and intrinsic events associated with the work.

This solves the problem of how to recreate a performance piece or an instillation piece that was interactive. One example thy use on the VMN website is whether to reinstall a work way the users may have altered it if it was an interactive work or install they way it looked originally, to do this the use the Variable Media Questionnaire to make sure the capture the artists intentions.

The web site gives some interesting examples of art that would benefit from the questionnaire in order to better understand the purpose of this project. According to the VMN website current aim of the affiliation between them and the Guggenheim is to help build a network of organizations that will develop the tools, methods and standards needed to implement a preservation strategy.

http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=98

http://www.variablemedia.net/e/welcome.html

I was thinking about this image recognition software that were talking about today in the presentation about the problem of cataloging graffiti and how this would work in a digital library. Then I realized this website is doing something similar and I love it. Its called FFFound! http://ffffound.com/ and it takes images from all over the web and posts them. There is very little text or metadata associated with them but when you click on an images it offers other images you might like, I think they must use this same software. Pretty cool.

Preserving Language

An interesting artlice from the times about saving lost languages: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/nyregion/29lost.html?hp

Data Visualizations

This isn’t exactly cultural heritage-specific, but I know that Dr. Pattuelli is interested (as probably some of you are too) in different and innovative ways for visualizing concepts and data.  So I thought I would share this site I just stumbled upon, which reviews new visualization software and applications: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/02/data-visualization-modern-approaches/

Of particular interest to us bookish types may be Amaztype, which is a search interface to create visualizations from Amazon titles and authors.

Internet Archive | Wayback Machine
I went on a search to find an internet website archive (this pertains to my previous post about preservation of websites) and came across this internet archive. The amount of information on here is incredible, there are projects pertaining to the internet, moving images, texts, audio…theres a lot to explore!
Heres the link: http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

Degenerate Art Database Goes Online

“The database, which is available here, is the work of the university’s “Degenerate Art” Research Center, which was founded in 2002 to study arts policy under the Third Reich, with an emphasis on the thousands of artworks the regime seized and the nearly 1,400 artists affected. Led by professor Klaus Krüger, the center’s team of researchers have compiled data on the artworks, links to images, and, most interestingly, details about where they currently reside — an intensely fraught piece of information, considering the ongoing restitution cases that have raged in courts ever since the fall of the Third Reich.”
http://bit.ly/dtDe6H