This detailed book is a “how-to” guide to building controlled vocabulary tools, cataloging and indexing cultural materials with terms and names from controlled vocabularies, and using vocabularies in search engines and databases to enhance discovery and retrieval online. Also covered are the following: What are controlled vocabularies and why are they useful? Which vocabularies exist for cataloging art and cultural objects? How should they be integrated in a cataloging system? How should they be used for indexing and for retrieval? How should an institution construct a local authority file? The links in a controlled vocabulary ensure that relationships are defined and maintained for both cataloging and retrieval, clarifying whether a rose window and a Catherine wheel are the same thing, or how pot-metal glass is related to the more general term stained glass. The book provides organizations and individuals with a practical tool for creating and implementing vocabularies as reference tools, sources of documentation, and powerful enhancements for online searching.

The field of biocultural diversity is emerging as a dynamic, integrative approach to understanding the links between nature and culture and the interrelationships between humans and the environment at scales from the global to the local. Its multifaceted contributions have ranged from theoretical elaborations, to mappings of the overlapping distributions of biological and cultural diversity, to the development of indicators as tools to measure, assess, and monitor the state and trends of biocultural diversity, to on-the-ground implementation in field projects. This book is a unique compendium and analysis of projects from all around the world that take an integrated biocultural approach to sustaining cultures and biodiversity. The 45 projects reviewed exemplify a new focus in conservation: this is based on the emerging realization that protecting and restoring biodiversity and maintaining and revitalizing cultural diversity and cultural vitality are intimately, indeed inextricably, interrelated. Published with Terralingua and IUCN

This book provides an overview of various challenges and contemporary research activities in cultural heritage information focusing particularly on the cultural heritage content types, their characteristic and digitization challenges; cultural heritage content organization and access issues; users and usability as well as various policy and sustainability issues associated with digital cultural heritage information systems and services. Cultural Heritage Information, the first book in the peer-reviewed i-Research series, contains eleven chapters that have been contributed by seventeen leading academics from six countries. The book begins with an introductory chapter that provides a brief overview of the topic of digital cultural heritage information with the subsequent chapters addressing specific issues and research activities in this topic. The ordering of the chapters moves from scene setting on policies and infrastructures, through considerations of interaction, access and objects, through to concrete system implementations. The book concludes by looking forward to issues around sustainability, in the widest sense, that are necessary to think about in order to maximize the availability and longevity of our digital cultural heritage. The key topics covered are: - Managing digital cultural heritage information - Digital humanities and digital cultural heritage (alt-history and future directions) - Management of cultural heritage information: policies and practices - Cultural heritage information: artefacts and digitization technologies - Metadata in cultural contexts – from manga to digital archives in linked open data environment - Managing cultural heritage: information systems architecture - Cultural heritage information users and usability - A framework for classifying and comparing interactions in cultural heritage information systems - Semantic access and exploration in cultural heritage digital libraries - Supporting exploration and use of digital cultural heritage materials: the PATHS perspective - Cultural heritage information services: sustainability issues. Readership: This will be essential reading for researchers in Information Science specifically in the areas of digital libraries, digital humanities and digital culture. It will also be useful for practitioners and students in these areas who want to know the different research issues and challenges and learn how they have been handled in course of various research projects in these areas.

By surveying a variety of projects and approaches to the difficult conservation-digitization balance, and in fostering a dialogue amongst practitioners, this book demonstrates that a dialogue between the fields of book conservation and digital humanities is not only possible, but in fact desirable and fruitful.