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 organizations. Although cultural and higher education institutions around the world are heavily investing on digitization 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.

The issue seeks to address this gap by bringing together interested parties from a range of disciplines (e.g. digital heritage, museology, information studies, digital humanities), practices and sectors to discuss the latest developments on evaluating the use of cultural digital resources.

Topics and Themes

The issue will appeal to academics and practitioners working in a range of disciplines: cultural heritage workers, arts professionals and scholars interested in issues relating to digital resources and their impact upon curation, education, engagement and outreach. We invite submissions of both theoretical and practical approaches, efforts and trends in this emergent field presenting innovative research. Topics and issues to be addressed include but are not limited to:

• Who uses digital cultural resources, where, and how these resources changed the consolidated working practice
• Addressing diverse users’ needs and expectations (i.e. from schoolchildren and families to students and researchers)
• Assessing impact, use and value of digital cultural resources (methodologies, approaches and issues)
• Ways of recording and assessing impact and value
• Models of access to digital collections
• Evaluating participatory models of work in digital cultural heritage (crowdsourcing, citizen science, co-creation, co-curation)
• Moving from impact to value when assessing digital resources
• Use of evaluation data in the curation of digital collections
• Integrating evaluation when working with communities in digital cultural heritage
• Adapting old and testing new innovative methods when evaluating quality, use and effectiveness of digital cultural resources
• User studies
• Metrics, webmetrics, infometrics and usage statistics
• Evaluating emotional impact in digital heritage
• Research on impact of social media on the usage of digital cultural resources

Organizers

The idea for this special issue arose from the activities of the Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation (ScotDigiCH) (scotdigich.wordpress.com/), funded by The Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2015-2016, and particularly from the discussions and papers presented at the International Symposium on Evaluating Digital Cultural Resources (EDCR2016) which took place in Glasgow in December 2016 (scotdigich.wordpress.com/events/symposium/). ScotDigiCH is coordinated by Information Studies 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.

This focused issue arises from the work of ScotDigiCH but invites submissions from all researchers and cultural heritage practitioners working in this area.

Paper Submission

Papers submitted to this special issue for possible publication must be original and must not be under consideration for publication in any other journal or conference. Previously published or accepted conference papers must contain at least 30% new material to be considered for the special issue.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage. Papers will be reviewed following the journal’s standard review process. Please follow the format instructions for the journal (jocch.acm.org/authors.cfm). All manuscripts must be prepared according to the journal publication guidelines which can also be found on the website provided above.

All papers are to be submitted at mc.manuscriptcentral.com/jocch. Upon submission, under “Article Type”, please select “Evaluation of Digital Cultural Resources” or your manuscript will not be reviewed correctly for the special issue.

Please address inquiries to Maria.Economou@glasgow.ac.uk.

Important Dates

• Paper submission deadline: November 30, 2017
• First Author Notification: January 30, 2018
• Revised papers expected: March 30, 2018
• Final acceptance notification: May, 2018
• Publication: Issue 4, 2018