Evaluating digital resources in cultural heritage: Lessons from the ScotDigiCH network

Abstract

The communication of collections information in digital form, whether it is an online catalogue, mobile application, or social media exchange, increasingly affects our cultural encounters and shapes our perception of cultural organizations. Cultural and higher education institutions in Scotland, in common with those in the rest of the world, are investing vast resources on digitization and making their collections available online but we still know very little about who uses these and how they interact with the data. In order to address this gap the Scottish Network on Digital Cultural Resources Evaluation. ScotDigiCH was initiated in January 2015 and brings together academics from different disciplines and professionals from Scotland's key cultural organizations in order to investigate how cultural digital resources are used by diverse user groups, how to record their impact on learning, research, and community engagement, and how to maximize their potential. It integrates different methodologies and perspectives (from digital humanities, computing science, museology, social sciences) and uses as a case study the Kelvin Hall Project in Glasgow. The Network has organized a series of four workshops, a knowledge exchange event and will organize an international symposium on digital cultural resources evaluation combined with a public lecture and an open public event to explore the Kelvin Hall digital collections portal. All these activities have certainly given all partners a lot of food for thought and are informing the Hunterian museum's Digital Strategy and how it takes digital curation, collections documentation, exhibition interpretation and visitor engagement forward. The paper discusses the methodology and lessons learned from the ScotDigiCH research network and the wider implication for other researchers and organizations working in digital cultural heritage.