Workshop on Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH) 

September 18, 2008, Aarhus, Denmark.

IACH 2008 website

Description

The Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH) workshop held in conjunction with ECDL 2008 will bring together academics carrying out research in the area of information access and practitioners working in the cultural heritage field. The goal of the workshop is promoting exchange of ideas concerning creation, curation, storage, retrieval and use of cultural heritage information. In particular, the workshop will focus on the question of how the keepers of cultural heritage resources can improve information access by applying information technology and principles currently being developed in the area of information access.

Following current trends, users are actively engaging with cultural heritage on the web, prompting heritage institutions to stimulate communities to grow around them. The workshop places an additional emphasis on active user participation, which creates new modes of access and contextualisation. These are challenging developments for cultural heritage organisations, due both to the variety and richness of cultural heritage resources and to the diverse range of users with varying information needs and search behaviors.

Scope 

Issues in the scope of the workshop include:

1. Emerging communities of users of cultural heritage information

• User generated content and metadata

• Online user communities

• Drawing in wider audiences for cultural heritage collections

• Understanding and modeling diverse user needs

• User interaction and interface design

• Visualization of cultural heritage resources

2. Information retrieval technology for improved access to cultural
heritage resources

• Exploiting user contributions in the representation and indexing of cultural heritage information

• Retrieval of structured and unstructured text

• Multimedia retrieval (images, video, audio,...)

• Access to distributed repositories

• Access to multilingual resources

• Evaluation and test collections

3. Innovative solutions for accessing cultural heritage on-line

• Case studies

4. Panel session focused on identifying key challenges facing access to
cultural information today.

Position papers

We welcome the submission poster papers, position papers (for panel participation) and extended abstracts (i.e., proposals for full papers) which should be written in English and prepared according to the Springer LNCS format guidelines. Submissions should be a maximum of 2 pages and manuscripts should be in PDF format.

Important Dates

Call for papers, Website: April 8, 2008
Abstracts for full length papers: June 8, 2008
Full Poster Papers/Full Position papers due: June 8, 2008
Notification: July 8, 2008
Final version full Papers due: August 18, 2008
Workshop: September 18, 2008