Information Studies Research

Technological Context

8.1 A wide range of technologies have, or are having, an impact on the heritage sector. We have concentrated on six areas, although many others might have been chosen.

8.2 Technology continues to advance at breakneck speed. Yesterday’s dream is today’s tool and next month’s junk. This underlines the need to direct funding for ICT in the heritage to those areas where it will have a lasting impact—for example, to produce information tools or resources which will have recurring heritage value. The costs of digital storage have been declining while the storage densities and speed of access have been dramatically increasing. Processors have become 100,000 times faster over the last forty years and, when inflation is taken into account, they are 1,000 times cheaper. Improvements in networks will yield similar advantages, enabling large and remote storage systems to function efficiently and seamlessly so as to appear as if they were local. Technology is actively squeezing as much bandwidth out of existing copper wires as possible. Although fibre-optic networks can transmit audio, video, and other data at speeds up to 100 times faster than standard copper wire (and technically the limits are much higher), it will be some time before we are able to reap all the benefits. Already it is feasible to transmit the entire Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) and the complete Oxford English Dictionary from London to Glasgow in seconds, but that is only from one central node to another. The problem is that from my home computer, using my 28k modem, it would take hours to receive just the roughly thirty-three million words of the DNB over the last mile in Glasgow. Nevertheless, these and many other developments have now made it possible to combine high quality still and moving images, high fidelity sound, with text, structured databases, Virtual Reality models, and provide all these features in an interactive environment.

8.3 Even though the speed of the technology does not yet meet users’ expectations or needs, networks have changed the kinds of access provided to users, altered the methods for distributing documents, and increased both the ease with which information can be accessed and the kinds of information available. Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs), databases, image banks, bibliographic resources, and text archives are easily available facilities. It is the most viable and cost effective way of reaching an audience and making heritage information visible. The trend now is home access and its predicted growth is incremental year-on-year for the reasonably foreseeable future. Digital television broadcasting and cable channels are part of this growth. Even if the model of ‘a PC in every home’ proves wrong, every home will certainly have access to the World Wide Web from the TV: using a remote control on a Web-TV (already launched in the US) it will be possible to watch a TV show about a country house and at the same time use the Web to find out about the architect and other houses he built. The spread of cable in cities will continue and will eventually offer access to high-speed networks from every home. Commercial network providers are eager to generate an extensive consumer base for networked services, the most promising of which are video-on-demand, home shopping, and interactive TV, so that people at home can take part in gameshows.

8.4 Technology is also changing the delivery of information. Until now the technology has fostered the current belief that interactive displays in museums tend to be individualistic. The sector needs to find more options for delivery of digital information. Research is needed into more flexible, portable systems that get away from obtrusive PC technology. Handheld televisions/portable computers may also be used in galleries for giving information to visitors. This rather simple idea extends the concept of the hand-held digital audio device, used so effectively at the Roman Baths Museum and Pump Room. Technology also opens up the possibility of multilingual labelling; national museums which depend upon non-native speakers could effectively use this to improve the experiences of visitors. Labelling what is accessible at a number of levels of sophistication and comprehension would also do much to enhance the visitor’s appreciation, and this depends on intelligent databases capable of fast response times. While the speed is feasible, and intelligent Database Management Systems (DBMSs) are possible, the basic data necessary for these applications are lacking.

8.5 Although portable phones and pagers are the most common manifestations of wireless technologies, other technologies do exist, such as personal digital assistants and other handheld presentation devices. Wireless technology has major advantages: it does not require installation of cabling in heritage buildings; and it can be used at most heritage sites and as part of survey and recording.

8.6 There are other technological trends to watch out for. Flat panel displays (especially thin-film transistor screens), both 5" to 36" diagonally, are beginning to come into production at affordable prices. In their current format, multimedia terminals have to be located away from the objects which they are about. With flat panel displays there will be no reason why these interactive devices could not be placed in cases next to (whether below or on the wall behind) the relevant objects. At the same time improvement in flat panel displays will include advances in average luminance, luminous efficiency, uniformity of luminance, reflectivity, pixel density, resolution, and power usage. These changes will transform the types of data that can be viewed, making it possible to study high resolution and 3D images, as well as to perform real-time data visualisation. They will alter the way the information can be integrated when it is presented on the screen. Increased pixel density, resolution, and luminance control, for example, make it possible to display images with greater clarity and realism—for example, paintings would appear with greater fidelity.

8.7 There is also a changing relationship between user and display. Researchers at the Heinrich-Hertz Institute (Berlin) have developed ‘gaze controlled 3-D user interfaces’. Blick uses an autostereoscopic display that represents objects in 3-D without the user wearing any special display equipment. The display device has integrated head and eye tracking cameras to monitor and adjust the presentation to the viewer’s position (there are still shortcomings, such as when a group shares the screen). In current Virtual Reality displays the 3D-model is manipulated on screen without any reference to the viewer.

8.8 Just as display technologies are improving so are the techniques for digitising materials. Recent work in 3D-digitisation shows remarkable promise. Developments in laser driven imaging and stereoscopic cameras are increasing the precision and accuracy of digital imaging. For instance, there are 3D imaging systems coming out of the laboratories which can capture 3D objects up to 1 metre square with an accuracy of 1mm. This kind of technology makes it possible to create detailed records of displays of heritage assets and, when combined with advances in display technologies, it opens possibilities for recording, presenting, and studying objects.

8.9 Keyboard literacy and physical disabilities will become less of an impediment to the use of computers, as spoken interfaces become more common and have greater differentiating capacity. They will make it possible for increasing numbers of people to take advantage of the opportunities posed by technology. These will make it feasible, with suitable underlying software, for users to make spoken requests, such as ‘show me the relative density distribution of ladybirds in the South of England’, and for the computer to search its database and display a map presenting the information. Remarkable strides have been made in speech synthesis and developments in speech recognition show increasing promise.

8.10 Research and developments in such areas as interface design, software development, and data modelling are having an impact on the ease with which applications for use in the heritage sector can be developed and the ways in which data can be manipulated and stored. One of the areas which is likely to have a significant impact on the ways we use heritage information is cross domain searching—the ability with a single query to search biological, habitat, archaeological, built heritage, and documentary data for information related to a single topic. This kind of holistic approach to heritage information retrieval is made possible by the research into interoperable catalogues. This work depends both on standards development and software development. Z39.50 is an example of the standards that form the basis for system development in this area. It enables databases to be queried even though they have different data structures, and use different software and hardware. The results of the queries are returned to the Web browser and can include catalogue and inventory entries or maps, photographs, plans, drawings, or texts. The user does not need to become familiar with different query languages for each information resource he/she wished to examine. The formulating of the query and the presentation of the results are handled by the Z39.50 standard.

8.11 Developing and delivering applications that depend upon information composed of a range of types of data, such as text, graphics, moving images, or sound was, until recently, difficult. These multimedia applications depended upon the use of proprietary software which often only ran on one kind of hardware. The creation of multimedia applications has been enabled by the development of Web server and client (i.e. browsers, such as Netscape, or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer) technologies, encoding standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and XML (eXtensible Markup Language), and portable software programming languages such as JAVATM. It is feasible to create incrementally complex and large assemblages of information and make them accessible to general audiences using interactive tailored interfaces.

Recommendations
 
18. The HLF should keep a watching brief on technology trends so that it anticipates and is not surprised by innovative applications of the technology and does not consider run-of-the-mill applications as risky.
 
19. The HLF should undertake regular reviews of ICT elements of the projects it funds.

8.12 Support is needed for applications of cutting edge technologies in the heritage sector and some consideration should be given, therefore, to supporting innovative applications of digital technologies which have generic applicability. The advantages which technology can offer to the heritage sector will continue to increase. While the bulk of ICT support should go into content, there may well be justification for the HLF to provide limited support for innovation, provided the project demonstrates that all the risks are ‘acceptable’ (see below ¶s 10.3-10.5).

Recommendation
 
20. Trustees should consider developing a future programme for innovative applications of ICT in heritage sectors.

Databases

8.13 Databases can be used to store information and to support its selection and comparison. There is a wide range of databases: structured text; image and text; multimedia; moving image; spatial (e.g. satellite imagery, maps); and sound. The Biological Records Centre (BRC) database includes over 6 million records covering more than 15,000 species. Using the converted register of Listed Buildings for England (see ¶ 7.10) people interested in our built heritage can identify structures of particular types and having specific features. It is now possible to identify comparable buildings in ways that were not possible before. The National Register of Archives and the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts have created databases of a quarter of a million records. This database, ARCHON, has been accessible through the Web since 1995 and is regularly updated. Across the heritage, databases provide an effective tool for storing and providing access to information. Databases of digitised photographic images can, for example, improve response times between requests for images and their delivery, give heritage institutions control over the level of quality of the image they may wish to deliver (e.g. low resolution for browsing, high resolution for publication), and facilitate the ability to record data about the images retrieved in meaningful ways (e.g. all photos of standing stone circles, images of fungi from Yorkshire, or photographs by Hill and Adamson).

8.14 As well as searching, sorting, and analysing, databases make it possible to produce geographical representations of the data provided by detailed biological and archaeological records, using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) or Virtual Reality models (see ¶s 8.15-8.16). This makes it possible to examine and present data in ways that help the user understand complex relationships and study change over time.

Recommendation
 
21. The HLF should support the development of database applications whether in the form of new content, retroconverted catalogues or records where these resources will be publicly accessible or provide heritage benefit.

Simulation and Virtual Reality

8.15 As Virtual Reality (VR) technology becomes more accessible, it offers great potential for the visualisation of heritage sites, landscapes, and buildings. These visualisations will be 3D and will permit the user to move through the environment and see it from various angles. Using archaeological data, databases, static images, and 3D interactive models, VR can bring to life data which are otherwise difficult to contextualise. For example, it can be used to present reconstructions of archaeological ruins, or show a visitor to a heritage building or landscape how it has changed over time. Computing hardware and software have advanced to a point where it is possible to construct and view these models using personal computers and to distribute them over the Internet. For example, Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML) makes interactive navigation accessible to anyone using the World Wide Web, provided they have sufficient bandwidth, memory and video display facilities. This means that users can experience a ‘virtual visit’ to an historic building, an archaeological site, or a landscape. These same tools can also be used to create representations of and demonstrate the impact of changes to the landscape on habitats, or to create the interface for multi-disciplinary presentations of heritage data, making links between the land, the buildings, the objects in museums, historical documents, and the environment in a holistic way, rather than the current arbitrary division in areas. If there is a shortcoming of the technology it is that the models can appear too realistic. For example, in reality archaeologists are often not sure about the reconstruction of ancient monuments, or there are conflicting interpretations; VR models do not always make these differences apparent to the visitor.

8.16 Assessment of the impact of new construction on the existing built heritage is often difficult. A team at the University of Bath created a virtual model of Bath. The model shows the buildings in context and how the built environment of the city will be affected by the proposed building. The City Council requires applicants seeking planning permission to pay to have the 3D model of their proposed construction inserted into the existing model so that the impact of the new structure on the existing built heritage can be visualised. Models, similar to that for Bath, depend upon the capture and encoding of megabytes of detailed data. This kind of modelling still requires relatively expensive processing, storage, and presentation hardware. However, these data can be reused in many different modelling exercises.

Recommendations
 
22. The HLF should support collaborative ventures between local authorities, companies, and other public bodies to develop resources that will assist the preservation and conservation of our natural or built heritage, and sub-surface archaeological deposits.
 
23. The collection of the necessary data should be supported by the HLF where the Virtual Reality model and the data will be publicly accessible.
 
24. Simulation systems that support the testing of vegetation coverage patterns of various plant types (e.g. forestry) should be eligible for support.

Websites

8.17 The World Wide Web provides a powerful way to obtain and distribute information, especially in the form of multimedia, including text, still and moving images, and audio. It can support interaction and collaboration with unrivalled ease. For museums and galleries a Website provides the scaffolding for an all-round service, before, during, and after a visit, and supports outreach to non-visitors. Websites can be used by libraries, archives, sites and monuments records, biological recording centres, and local communities to provide access to information resources which were traditionally only available to those who visited the particular institution or which were not in the past available to the general public (e.g. collections data). There is general agreement among institutions which have already developed Websites that the more people look at Websites run by heritage institutions, the more likely they are to make a visit. As well as using the Web for publicity purposes and to provide access to information resources, such as retroconverted library catalogues and archival finding aids or even simple textual resources, the Web can be used to deliver multimedia and interactive educational materials. In a society that will increasingly need and desire to benefit from lifelong learning opportunities, more pressure is placed on heritage bodies to develop and deliver these materials. Websites can also make the heritage accessible to the disabled, who may find it impossible to visit particular heritage sites in person.

8.18 Web technology is getting simpler to use (for both the developer and end user) and more cost effective all the time. While Web technology helped to foster the explosive growth in use of the Internet; the way it supports access, delivery, and display technologies makes immature use of networked resources to obtain and distribute material. More flexible access and delivery services are likely to replace the Web. The problem is not just with the technology itself but with current understanding about how best to use it. For example, at the moment the quality of museum Websites is very poor, and this is especially true of those sites using Virtual Reality. They are trying too hard to replicate the physical museum space and case, which is not relevant to virtual visitors, rather than attempting to make interesting associations and links that would be impossible in physical space. Some Websites have already achieve high standards. For instance the Countryside Commission Website and especially the Countryside Council for Wales demonstrate the effectiveness of using Websites for outreach.

8.19 The closest equivalent to Websites in print is marketing materials and published catalogues. The HLF does not fund the development of these materials in print form and there is no case for it to fund the creation of these kinds of Websites. The decision to develop a Website must be taken in the context of a comparison of the benefits of providing such a service with the costs of developing and maintaining it. It is true that Websites provide much greater outreach opportunities than traditional printed materials. The Hampshire County Museums Service had developed a database including records of some 80,000 items. When the Museums Service took the decision to make these accessible to the general public they reported that it was relatively easy to convert the records so that they would be available to Internet users. Heritage organisations which have developed core data sets and other kinds of resources will be increasingly likely to make these materials available over the Internet. Instead of creating a data set specifically for the Web and binding it to a particular technology, institutions must look to more flexible use of ICT which allows them to respond to a changing pattern of delivery technologies. In this arena it is the use of open systems that ensures the flexible reuse of primary resources.

Recommendations
 
25. The HLF should not fund the development or maintenance of institutional Websites and intranets.
 
26. Projects receiving HLF support which produce materials in digital form should be required as a matter of course to establish a Web presence as a by-product of their development activities.

8.20 However, there is one type of Website—a national-level collaborative cultural Website—that the HLF might wish to consider supporting, if such a national collaboration should ever emerge. A number of countries have begun to develop cultural networks providing access to heritage organisations, and the activities and events they sponsor. An Australian project aims to encourage the transition of Australian cultural industries to an online environment:

• to improve broad public access to heritage collections as well as the full range of cultural activities they sponsor; and
• to accelerate the uptake of online services in cultural organisations as a means of delivering their products and services more efficiently and effectively.

8.21 The Australian case is part of a trend in the development of national information resources which are consistent, coherent, and comprehensive. This model could be applied in the UK for a heritage network. It certainly has all the hallmarks of an excellent collaborative project which could involve HLF, the Tourist Boards, the Department of Trade and Industry, local authorities and a range of local and national heritage organisations. This approach would fit well with ICT Policy Development activities which DCMS is pursuing. Collaboration would be essential as the Australian experience demonstrates how complex the development process can be (see below ¶s 9.11-9.14).

Interactive Displays

8.22 Interactive displays can help users to place artefacts in context. For example, in natural history galleries the use of interactive supporting images and sounds from landscapes provide an effective mechanism to allow users to contextualise holdings. Visitors can find out more information about objects that interest them, compare holdings in one museum with those of another, and see alternative views of particular items (e.g. close-up images of details or parts hidden from view), accompanied by commentary. What most organisations mean by ‘interactive’ is restricted to computer screens which make it possible for users to follow particular paths, depending upon the choices they make as they use the system. This is in many ways a very limited view of an interactive activity. The other problem which plagues interactive displays is the process by which they are developed, which depends on team effort harnessing the unique opportunities offered by the medium, while avoiding the dangers it poses. The development team often includes curator, system designer, specialist writer, interface designer, and programmer. Teamwork is not new. Like many museums, at the National Museum of Science and Technology (Ontario, Canada) the development of conventional display materials begins with the curator preparing basic descriptive material, which is passed to the interpretative division which gives it level, tone and length; it then goes to the specialist writer, and finally to a graphic designer. Where ICT is used, teams of this kind have now been extended to include ICT specialists.

8.23 There are at least two arguments against funding the development of interactive displays.

• First, the ways of developing interactive displays are changing rapidly and the costs and risks associated with them are dropping. A reasonable element of interactive technology could be expected (and supported) in almost any interpretative scheme.
• Second, interactive exhibits, in comparison with exhibition displays, are often considered to have a short life, but recently the assumptions about the long life of exhibits have been challenged.

Museums spend about £2,000 per square metre for an exhibition on the assumption that it will have a 15 year life (e.g. Croydon Lifetimes exhibition), but the marketplace suggests that visitors want something new every three to five years. The Ontario Science Centre plans a 10 year life for exhibits unless using new and rapidly changing technologies. In many ways interactive displays are just a new tool for the curator to use selectively. As many authors point out, the questions asked asked of a hi-tech exhibit must begin with the same sorts of questions asked before developing a conventional display. For example: what are the educational objectives of the exhibit, and who is the target audience?

8.24 The problem is that heritage organisations often get involved in multimedia or ICT development because their neighbours are doing it, without:

• thinking through their needs;
• analysing the costs in detail;
• identifying whether multimedia interactives offer the only way to achieve the desired results; and
• whether they have the resources to maintain the system, update it, and provide support to visitors.

In order to measure the success of these projects, it is important to define both quantitative and qualitative criteria, to measure effectiveness of learning as well as enjoyment (see ¶s 10.1-10.2). Setting all these criticisms aside, it is possible to use interactive displays in very effective ways to integrate the visitor into the museum experience. The Boston Computer Museum has a common visitor interface in some of its galleries; this gives the visitor a sense of participating in a journey through the technology galleries and it imparts a consistent user-focused message. In view of the different ways interactive displays can be assessed, two guiding principles should be applied when deciding whether they should be developed and used: fitness for purpose and fitness for use.

Fitness for purpose implies that the use of the interactive displays will achieve clear objectives and that the level of the technology is commensurate with these objectives.
Fitness for use implies that the interactives are viable in the heritage setting and have been developed with the user in mind.
In the case of the Roman Mosaics Gallery in Reading Museum, interactive technologies seem well-suited to the display because they assist visitors to understand substantial complex items, which benefit greatly from being contextualised, and because the cost of their display makes the clarity of their heritage value and meaning especially significant. The interactives at the London Transport Museum are beginning to look old but, like the ten-year old interactives at the Merseyside Museums, they still continue to play a positive role in the visitor’s experience. With computer displays, the interface is likely to start looking old-fashioned very quickly, but if the content is relevant, this does not matter.

8.25 The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN), which is funded by the Millennium Commission, exists on the premise that the key issue is to create the resource base and let the interactive multimedia displays take care of themselves. In order for this to happen there is a need to document collections and create high-quality digital images of heritage items. Interactive displays depend upon the existence of core resources in digital form. They also need to be changed with some frequency in response to the changing expectations of visitors and the rapidly changing technological environment and opportunities. Where core resources form the basis of interactives, it is possible to change the display technologies in response to new technological opportunities, improved understanding of visitor learning, and enhanced delivery.

Recommendations
 
27. The HLF should not fund the development of interactive displays unless they are a by-product of a consistent and coherent underlying access to and underlying presentation of information service.
 
28. The HLF should not fund interactives unless the applicant has built a clear case that interactive displays meet the criteria of fitness for purpose and use.
 
29. When the HLF does fund proposals for interactives they should be applications which support and accommodate group interaction (e.g. slave monitors, interfaces for multiple users, communication between different users).
 
30. Applicants proposing to develop interactive displays should be required to describe in full the team model which they propose applying and how it will be managed in practice (see project management below ¶s 10.6-10.10).
 
31. The HLF should encourage projects which wish to develop interactive displays to do so in collaboration with commercial partners.

Application Development

8.26 Commercially available applications meet the information management needs of most projects. Only rarely is it necessary to create new software. Wherever possible, it is better to tailor an existing software package to meet specific requirements than to design and develop new software from scratch. Software tools for creating applications provide flexible and reliable development paths which can help projects to limit the risks associated delivering computer-based tools. By using development software or tailoring generic applications, it is feasible to produce applications to meet specific needs. The Countryside Management System (CMS) used Microsoft Access (version 2.0) to provide those who manage the countryside with a computer-based application to promote efficient and effective planning, monitoring, and recording of countryside information. The application helps with this by providing a standard way to identify and describe the objectives of site or species management, to produce work plans, and to monitor the effectiveness of the plan against the achieved objectives. Because CMS handles information in a standard way it is possible to exchange site management data within and between sites. Other packages exist or are under development. For example, after studying the issues surrounding the recording of portable antiquities, DMCS has begun sponsoring a pilot programme at six sites which will all use the database application to record finds. It is hoped that if the pilot proves successful it can be extended more widely. INCA (interactive catalogue), an application developed at the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, is an example of the general-purpose museum cataloguing tools capable of supporting data input, view, editing, searching, and printing increasingly common in medium-size museums.

Technological Pitfalls

8.27 The use of information technology poses many pitfalls:

• over-optimistic expectations;
• difficulties of modelling data and information;
• rapid redundancy of hardware and software;
• complexity of even tailoring application software to meet specific needs;
• difficulties of information retrieval;
• such data type specific problems as, for instance, calibrating colour at all stages from digital capture to display on screen;
• issues surrounding the development of interoperable catalogues;
• shortage and high-cost of support services such as training; and
• problems surrounding the maintenance of hardware, software, and applications.

8.28 A significant drawback to digital resources is that the only ways of locating information are either to browse manually the entire collection or to use a descriptive index or catalogue. This has major and obvious shortcomings. Anyone who has used the retrieval tools available on the Web is aware of the limited functionality of text browsers. Increasing emphasis is being placed on tools for searching images themselves. For example, powerful optical character recognition software, such as Excalibur, can search digital images of textual materials to find information. The success rate is variable and the range of character sets is limited.

8.19 Currently, the most common way to locate particular images is by means of their textual descriptors. Icon-based materials, paintings, monuments, archaeological remains, and audio materials, such as spoken language (e.g. oral history recordings) and music, require tools that can search for image or sound patterns with greater levels of subtlety and discrimination than is currently possible using text searching tools when searching for text-based information. A remarkable concentration of effort has now been focused on the searching of images using content-based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. CBIR techniques, while still in their infancy, have demonstrated that eventually colour, texture, sketch, shape, volume, spatial constraints, motion and other subjective and objective attributes will be used to find images in databases. Similar problems exist for the content-based retrieval of audio (CBAR) material. Effective retrieval technologies for images will be available within the next five years.

8.30 High-fidelity sound, high-resolution still and moving images, and interactive multimedia sessions can all effectively be distributed across those segments of the network supporting maximum bandwidth. What continues to be a problem for users is the quality of the local services (see example in ¶ 8.2 above). Without high-speed access to the network from the desktop (whether home, office, or classroom), the advantages of the wide area network will be limited. In order for their catalogues of images to have marketable value, the BBC has determined that they must be linked to potential content buyers by connections capable of supporting 1MB per second transfer rates, if the user is to be able to view and browse them. If they wished to distribute production quality material for real-time use, then the network bandwidth would need to exceed 15MB per second. The issues associated with this have less to do with developing new technologies and more to do with integrating a variety of components—storage, server technologies, databases, front-ends (i.e. interfaces), and high bandwidth communications facilities. There are a number of experiments in network delivery but these tend to concentrate on video-on-demand; the benefit to the heritage will come from the penetration of the technology into the consumer marketplace. The heritage community does not need to act to encourage take-up of the technology because other factors are making certain this happens, but it does need to be ready with content that can take advantage of these facilities as they become available.