Exploring determinants of early user acceptance for an audio-visual heritage archive service using the vignette method

The purpose of this study is to investigate factors, which explain the behavioural intention of the use of a new audio-visual cultural heritage archive service. An online survey in combination with a factorial survey is utilised to investigate the predictable strength of technological, individual and contextual constructs. The case used to validate this model is that of a not-yet-existing audio-visual archive service. Based on data collected from the survey (N = 1939), it is confirmed that payment and interpersonal influence the intention to adopt a new service thus partially supporting our three-dimensional model (i.e. technology, individual and context). The study contributes to the field of adoption research by studying a new service rather than an existing one. Subsequently, a vignette study is adopted. Moreover, the field of audio-visual archives is introduced in user research, which is considered novel. Pioneering on the unlocking of audio-visual archive this research seeks answers in the user needs and determinants for services upon these archives. Furthermore, the practical and scientific implications are discussed.     

The design of a Virtual Library of Emblem Books

Antique documents, which undoubtedly represent our cultural heritage and can be considered a very rich source of information, are kept in many countries only on libraries with historical archives. The antiquity and fragility of such documents makes their access very restricted. Considering that nowadays the Internet is one of the most interesting places to publish any kind of information, it seems logical to use it to both preserve our cultural heritage and provide a broader access to these documents. This work presents a virtual library that stores data, transcribed texts and digitalized pages of historic Spanish documents from the 16th–18th centuries. This virtual library has two main objectives: first, by offering a set of services, including a powerful user interface to search and browse the documents, a bulletin board, a chat, or mail boxes, the virtual library is transformed into a meeting place for researchers that use emblem books as sources of information for their studies. Second, the virtual library contributes to the preservation of emblem books. We shall describe in this work the project that led to the development of the Virtual Library of Emblem Books, showing its evolution from the beginning (simple search forms and answer pages) to its current state as a virtual library, focusing on the techniques used to build an intuitive and powerful user interface. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How do we inspire people to contact aboriginal culture with Web2.0 technology?

Culture right have become a newly emerging human rights around the world after 1980. From a long term perspective of culture protection, it is very important to focus on culture propagation and preservation. Under the erosion of mainstream culture, the preservation issue of aboriginal culture has become a particular important issue. For the sake, this study explores how information technology can be used to effectively help preserve, promote and revitalize traditional Formosan aboriginal cultures through the implementation of digital archives, which can make a culture to be more readily accessible to the general public. To have a better understand about what factors prompt users to continually access the digital culture archive. This paper first presents an adaptation of ‘Web 2.0’ to build a digital archive for the Atayal Culture Museum in Taiwan. Then, explores correlations between constructs such as Web 2.0 site characteristics, media richness, para-social presence, user experience, user satisfaction and user intention. The results could be useful in developing integrated platforms or tools for educational purposes, allowing teachers and students to effectively share and apply cultural and educational resources. Another objective is to revitalize and commercialize the cultural industry, using the digital archive's content as the basis for collaboration with teachers and other relevant professionals to achieve maximum creativity and create practical and innovative digital learning products.     

Assessment of the NEOTHEMI virtual museum project – An on-line survey

The NEOTHEMI Comenius 3 network focused on cultural heritage and aimed to produce a virtual museum of cultural heritage from ten countries in Europe, including Hungary, which joined the EU in 2004, and Norway, an associated country, to encourage users to develop an understanding of the cultural heritage of other European countries and to feel more European. This paper assesses the effectiveness of the project in reaching its target audience.     

A case study of user immersion-based systematic design for serious heritage games

Modern digital technologies support the preservation and transfer of cultural heritage information via devices and applications such as digital storage systems, electronic books and virtual museums. Advances in virtual and augmented reality, real-time computer graphics and computer games have made it possible to construct large virtual environments in which users may experience cultural heritage through a variety of interactions and immersions. Thus, an emerging problem is to implement an appropriate systematic design method for achieving various types of entertainment, learning and information transfer. This paper proposes two important design factors that impact on user immersion in serious heritage games: user interface space volume and subsystem sequence. The impact of the two factors on proposed systematic design methods was investigated through comparative studies by implementing a serious heritage game system on three different platforms.     

User-interface design for the Ripoll Monastery exhibition at the National Art Museum of Catalonia

Computer graphics and virtual reality technologies provide powerful tools for visualizing, documenting and disseminating cultural heritage. Virtual inspection tools have been used proficiently to show cultural artifacts either through the web or in museum exhibits. The usability of the user interface has been recognized to play a crucial role in overcoming the typical fearful attitude of the cultural heritage community towards 3D graphics. In this paper we discuss the design of the user interface for the virtual inspection of the impressive entrance of the Ripoll Monastery in Spain. The system was exhibited in the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) and it is now part of the Romanesque exhibition at the MAPFRE foundation. The MNAC is the third most visited art museum in Spain, and features the world's largest collection on Romanesque Art. We analyze the requirements from museum curators and discuss the main interface design decisions. The user interface combines (a) focus-plus-context visualization, with focus (detail view) and context (overview) being shown at separate displays, (b) touch-based camera control techniques, and (c) continuous feedback about the exact location of the detail area within the entrance. The interface allows users to aim the camera at any point of the entrance with centimeter accuracy using a single tap. We provide the results of a user study comparing our user interface with alternative approaches. We also discuss the benefits the exhibition had to the cultural heritage community.     

针灸铜人三维可视化研究与应用

针灸铜人是中国古代医学珍贵的艺术品,具有重要的文化和艺术价值。针对针灸铜人等文化遗产数字化保护手段传统单一,体验性差和传播力不强等问题,本文综合利用三维激光扫描、三维可视化和虚拟现实等技术提出了一种新的数字化方法。以湖北省博物馆珍藏的腧穴针灸铜人为对象,首先采用三维激光扫描技术进行数据采集和模型构建,然后利用XML语言对其承载的传统中医知识进行表示与存储;其次,基于改进的二次误差度量和递进网格算法实现了铜人多分辨率简化模型的自动生成;最后,基于Unity引擎开发了一套针灸铜人虚拟交互展示系统,实现了穴位、经络和常见疾病等传统中医知识在三维虚拟场景下的可视化展示与交互查询。本文提出的方法可以为历史文物与非物质文化遗产的数字化保护与传播提供借鉴。     

User-configurable OCR enhancement for online natural history archives

The creation of structured digital libraries from paper-based archives is an area of growing demand in many scientific and cultural fields, and is not satisfied either by off-the-shelf OCR or commercial form- processing systems. This paper describes and evaluates a configurable archive construction system, which integrates document image pre-processing and analysis with text post-processing tools and a standard OCR package to meet digital archiving requirements. The prototype system is currently being used in conjunction with the UK Natural History Museum to help convert more than 500,000 cards of Lepidoptera (Butterflies and Moths) and Coleoptera (Beetles) to searchable digital archives. Evaluation results covering different aspects of the system from card scanning to overall word recognition rates for different database fields are summarised for two datasets comprising over 5,000 cards selected from different parts of these archives. First-pass end-to-end word recognition rates of 70–90% are reported for key data fields, subject to availability of suitable electronic dictionaries. Further validation and correction is supported through web-editing of the online digital archive.     

Towards extracting event-centric collections from Web archives

Web archives constitute an increasingly important source of information for computer scientists, humanities researchers and journalists interested in studying past events. However, currently there are no access methods that help Web archive users to efficiently access event-centric information in large-scale archives that go beyond the retrieval of individual disconnected documents. In this article, we tackle the novel problem of extracting interlinked event-centric document collections from large-scale Web archives to facilitate an efficient and intuitive access to information regarding past events. We address this problem by: (1) facilitating users to define event-centric document collections in an intuitive way through a Collection Specification; (2) development of a specialised extraction method that adapts focused crawling techniques to the Web archive settings; and (3) definition of a function to judge the relevance of the archived documents with respect to the Collection Specification taking into account the topical and temporal relevance of the documents. Our extended experiments on the German Web archive (covering a time period of 19 years) demonstrate that our method enables efficient extraction of event-centric collections for different event types.

     

Personalization in cultural heritage: the road travelled and the one ahead

Over the last 20?years, cultural heritage has been a favored domain for personalization research. For years, researchers have experimented with the cutting edge technology of the day; now, with the convergence of internet and wireless technology, and the increasing adoption of the Web as a platform for the publication of information, the visitor is able to exploit cultural heritage material before, during and after the visit, having different goals and requirements in each phase. However, cultural heritage sites have a huge amount of information to present, which must be filtered and personalized in order to enable the individual user to easily access it. Personalization of cultural heritage information requires a system that is able to model the user (e.g., interest, knowledge and other personal characteristics), as well as contextual aspects, select the most appropriate content, and deliver it in the most suitable way. It should be noted that achieving this result is extremely challenging in the case of first-time users, such as tourists who visit a cultural heritage site for the first time (and maybe the only time in their life). In addition, as tourism is a social activity, adapting to the individual is not enough because groups and communities have to be modeled and supported as well, taking into account their mutual interests, previous mutual experience, and requirements. How to model and represent the user(s) and the context of the visit and how to reason with regard to the information that is available are the challenges faced by researchers in personalization of cultural heritage. Notwithstanding the effort invested so far, a definite solution is far from being reached, mainly because new technology and new aspects of personalization are constantly being introduced. This article surveys the research in this area. Starting from the earlier systems, which presented cultural heritage information in kiosks, it summarizes the evolution of personalization techniques in museum web sites, virtual collections and mobile guides, until recent extension of cultural heritage toward the semantic and social web. The paper concludes with current challenges and points out areas where future research is needed.     

A recommender agent based on learning styles for better virtual collaborative learning experiences

Almost unlimited access to educational information plethora came with a drawback: finding meaningful material is not a straightforward task anymore. Based on a survey related to how students find additional bibliographical resources for university courses, we concluded there is a strong need for recommended learning materials, for specialized online search and for personalized learning tools. As a result, we developed an educational collaborative filtering recommender agent, with an integrated learning style finder. The agent produces two types of recommendations: suggestions and shortcuts for learning materials and learning tools, helping the learner to better navigate through educational resources. Shortcuts are created taking into account only the user’s profile, while suggestions are created using the choices made by the learners with similar learning styles. The learning style finder assigns to each user a profile model, taking into account an index of learning styles, as well as patterns discovered in the virtual behavior of the user. The current study presents the agent itself, as well as its integration to a virtual collaborative learning environment and its success and limitations, based on users’ feedback.     

Virtual inspector: a flexible visualizer for dense 3D scanned models.

Virtual inspector lets novice users inspect dense 3D models at interactive frame rates on commodity PCs. The system obtains visualization efficiency without sacrificing quality by adopting a continuous level-of-detail representation. Visual inspector's use of XML to encode the GUI's structure and behavior makes it flexible and configurable. We can improve the virtual inspector system by adding new functionality and increasing its efficiency. Few restorers would consider the simple visualization of a digital 3D replica as the ultimate goal for the use of 3D scanning technologies in cultural heritage contexts. Once we can visualize an artifact with great accuracy, the need to map other data on the 3D model will rise. We're working on a slightly extended version of the tool to support mapping and selective visualization of different sources of surface data. We're also developing tools to compute measures. Finally, we're working to more dynamically enrich the data linked to the mesh by letting users add annotations or link multimedia material to selected points of the artifact surface. Our goal is to transform virtual inspector into a more dynamic instrument for cultural heritage research and restoration.     

一种基于Xen的信任虚拟机安全访问设计与实现

结合信任计算技术与虚拟化技术,提出了一种基于Xen的信任虚拟机安全访问机制,为用户提供了一种有效的安全访问敏感数据的模式。其核心思想是利用虚拟机的隔离性,为数据信息应用提供一个专用的隔离环境,同时利用信任计算技术保证该虚拟平台配置状态的可信性。     

Towards building a blog preservation platform

Social media content and user participation has increased dramatically since the advent of Web 2.0. Blogs have become relevant to every aspect of business and personal life. Nevertheless, we do not have the right tools to aggregate and preserve blog content correctly, as well as to manage blog archives effectively. Given the rising importance of blogs, it is crucial to build systems to facilitate blog preservation, safeguarding an essential part of our heritage that will prove valuable for current and future generations. In this paper, we present our work in progress towards building a novel blog preservation platform featuring robust digital preservation, management and dissemination facilities for blogs. This work is part of the BlogForever project which is aiming to make an impact to the theory and practice of blog preservation by creating guidelines and software that any individual or organization could use to preserve their blogs.     

分布式开放存取期刊爬虫的设计与实现

开放存取（open access,OA）期刊属于网络深层资源且分散在互联网中,传统的搜索引擎不能对其建立索引,不能满足用户获取OA期刊资源的需求,从而造成了开放资源的浪费。针对如何集中采集万维网上分散的开放存取期刊资源的问题,提出了一个面向OA期刊的分布式主题爬虫架构。该架构采用主从分布式设计,提出了基于用户预定义规则的OA期刊页面学术信息提取方法,由一个主控中心节点控制多个可动态增减的爬行节点,采用基于Chrome浏览器的插件机制来实现分布式爬行节点的可扩展性和部署的灵活性。     

Tele-immersive product evaluation: a review and an implementation framework

A novel virtual tele-immersive product evaluation environment is conceived. The components for the tele-immersive virtual environment for product evaluation include a robust virtual reality (VR) hardware system, associated VR driving software, development tool for the tele-immersive virtual environment, networking software, user representation scheme and tools for developing 3D models and incorporating dynamic properties into the models. We have developed a model to allow users to collaboratively evaluate products using the CAVE^TM, Performer, CAVERN, CAVEActors, Pro/ENGINEER, and ADAMS.     

Studying online: evaluation of an online study environment

This study evaluates student use of an online study environment. Its purposes were to (1) determine if college students will voluntarily use online study tools, (2) identify characteristics of users and nonusers of the tools, and (3) determine if the use of online study tools relates to course achievement. Approximately 25% of students used the online tools for more than one hour before each of three examinations. In comparing use of the study tools provided, the largest number of students made use of the online lecture notes and the greatest amount of online study time was devoted to reviewing multiple choice questions. The perceived ease of access to the Internet differentiated tool users from nonusers. Study tool users scored higher on course examinations after accounting for measures of ability and study skill.     

Evaluating a digital humanities research environment: the CULTURA approach

Digital humanities initiatives play an important role in making cultural heritage collections accessible to the global community of researchers and general public for the first time. Further work is needed to provide useful and usable tools to support users in working with those digital contents in virtual environments. The CULTURA project has developed a corpus agnostic research environment integrating innovative services that guide, assist and empower a broad spectrum of users in their interaction with cultural artefacts. This article presents (1) the CULTURA system and services and the two collections that have been used for testing and deploying the digital humanities research environment, and (2) an evaluation methodology and formative evaluation study with apprentice researchers. An evaluation model was developed which has served as a common ground for systematic evaluations of the CULTURA environment with user communities around the two test bed collections. The evaluation method has proven to be suitable for accommodating different evaluation strategies and allows meaningful consolidation of evaluation results. The evaluation outcomes indicate a positive perception of CULTURA. A range of useful suggestions for future improvement has been collected and fed back into the development of the next release of the research environment.