Europeana and Beyond: User Interaction and Collaboration in Multilingual Cultural Heritage Information Systems
An overview of cultural heritage information systems and in particular Europeana (www.europeana.eu), Europe's single access point to cultural heritage aggregating material from archives, libraries and museums. Due to the multicultural and multilingual dimension of Europeana, a supporting project cluster tackles issues such as the heterogeneity and multilinguality of the presented objects and/or their metadata. I will focus on cross-lingual search solutions developed in these projects and their evaluation.
In addition, a project will be presented which offers innovative ways for users to interact with cultural heritage, and the idea of a collaboratively formed cultural information space will be discussed. This project also demonstrates how users can add their perspectives, through story telling, to cultural heritage material they engage with.
Juliane Stiller is a researcher at the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at Humboldt University, Berlin, and is currently visiting student researcher at the I School. She is working on multilingual information retrieval and evaluation of digital libraries within the EU-funded projects EuropeanaConnect, GALATEAS, and Promise. The research of her doctoral thesis focuses on user-generated content and user interaction in cultural heritage information systems and how this can be leveraged to improve multilingual information access. Before taking on this research position, she was employed at Google Ltd. as a Search Quality Analyst for web search.
