Managing, Delivering, and Enhancing Cultural Digital Collections

Museums, galleries, and other cultural heritage institutions have collections in their care that face increasingly complicated problems in management, conservation, and dissemination. The right combination of services can raise the profile of an institution, increase visitor numbers, and generate revenue essential to sustain heritage activities. Digitally accessible collections have the potential to enhance and complement the physical museum while facilitating conservation and increasing accessibility through carefully-developed user interfaces. This paper provides a framework for delivering digital access to a wide variety of collections. Practical, technical, and innovative considerations are discussed with a focus on defining objectives and priorities and creating an infrastructure that can grow and change over time. Digitisation, delivery systems, user interfaces, and search tools are emphasised. Common techniques, such as free- text searching and thesauri are covered alongside a discussion of content-based image retrieval as applied as an enhancement to the Corporation of London Guildhall Library and Art Gallery site, Collage.