“Digital technologies are affecting all aspects of our lives, reshaping the way we communicate, learn, and approach the world around us. In the case of cultural institutions, digital applications are used in all key areas of operation, from documenting, interpreting and exhibiting the collections to communicating with diverse audience groups. The communication of collections information in digital form, whether an online catalogue, mobile application, museum interactive or social media exchange, increasingly affects our cultural encounters and shapes our perception of cultural organisations. Although cultural and higher education institutions around the world are heavily investing on digitisation and working to make their collections available online, we still know very little about who uses digital collections, how they interact with the associated data, and what the impacts of these digital resources are.”

Aims and Questions

“The symposium seeks to address this gap by bringing together interested parties from a range of disciplines (e.g. computing science, digital humanities, museology, social sciences), practices and sectors to set an agenda for research and discuss the latest developments on evaluating the use of cultural digital resources.”

• Who uses digital cultural resources, where and how
• Diverse users’ needs and expectations (i.e. from schoolchildren and families to students and researchers)
• Impact and value of digital cultural resources
• Ways of recording and assessing impact and value
• Implications for policy and future strategies

Papers should engage with :

• Models of access to digital collections
• Crowdsourcing, co-creation, co-curation in digital cultural heritage
• Evaluating impact and use of digital cultural resources (methodologies, approaches and issues)
• Moving from impact to value when assessing digital resourcesCuration of digital collections
• Working with communities in digital cultural heritage
• Participatory models of work
• Methods of evaluating digital resources
• User studies
• Metrics, webmetrics, infometrics and usage statistics
• Crowdsourcing and citizen science in cultural heritage
• Assessing impact and value
• Social media usage research

Presentations will be 20 minutes in length, followed by time for questions and discussion. A selection of accepted papers will be published as a special issue of a peer reviewed journal.

How to Submit a Proposal

Proposals should consist of an extended abstract (approximately 500 to 700 words excluding references) that explains how the paper relates to the key themes of the symposium. Furthermore, each abstract should outline the aims, research questions, methods, main findings and underlying work of the proposed paper.

Please use the document template available at the symposium web site https://scotdigich.wordpress.com/events/symposium/call-for-papers/ and follow the instructions for submitting your proposal by Friday, October 7, 2016.

A limited number of travel bursaries are available to postgraduate students and early-career researchers to facilitate their participation at the workshop. For more information please contact ScotDigiCH@gmail.com (link sends e-mail).

The ScotDigiCH is funded by The Royal Society of Edinburgh and co-ordinated by the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII), at the University of Glasgow in collaboration with The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Life Museums, the Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland and the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Strathclyde.