The CULTURA project: Supporting next generation interaction with digital cultural heritage collections

Abstract

In recent years there has been a marked uptake in the digitisation of cultural heritage collections. Though this has enabled more sources to be made available to experts and the wider public, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with cultural archives. This is largely due to the monolithic nature of many digital archives; the challenge of understanding large collections, especially if the language is inconsistent; and because users vary in expertise and have different tasks and goals that they are trying to accomplish. This paper describes CULTURA, an FP7 funded project that is addressing these specific issues. The various technologies and approaches being used by CULTURA are discussed, along with the lessons learnt thus far. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.