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Digital Tools for Museums and Cultural Heritage

The prodigious number of tools that are potentially relevant to researchers working in the field of MCH inevitably means that the items mentioned in this relatively brief paper will only represent a partial and subjective selection. The references draw heavily on accounts of activities and research broadly related to the groups and individuals that have participated in Methods Network funded activities or who have otherwise come to our attention through our links to organisations such as the the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service), AHeSSC (the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre), 3D Viznet and a number of other organisations who have interests in this area.

Inevitably, this paper will duplicate some of the content featured in other working papers in this series. There is a particularly significant overlap between the MCH sector and activities relating to archaeology, history and art history, all three of which have been the subject of recent papers. Certain tools and techniques that might broadly be defined as relating to the field of information management (i.e. ontologies, thesauri etc.) but which have specific relevance to the MCH sector, are also referred to in the working paper entitled ‘Digital Tools for Library and Information Studies’. This makes reference to the influential and very important ontology model, CIDOC-CRM7 (see below) and also makes reference to a number of data standards.

Read the full Working Paper : (pdf)

Image: Carl Smith, from presentation at Methods Network Seminar, Theoretical Approaches to Virtual Representations of Past Environments, Goldsmiths College, 7 March 2007