Digital cultural heritage is not digital resources imbued with cultural value, but networked access to usable digital representations of tangible, intangible and natural cultural heritage. Digital is a means, not an end.
The intrinsic value of the representation is from the heritage, with a limiting factor of its fitness-for-purpose or usability. The actual value is only realized through interaction, and resulting experiential impact.
The impact comes both from the digital and the heritage resource. Digital is the epitome of economic non-rivalrous good, whereas heritage is the opposite as experiential scarcity adds emotional attachment and value.
Diversity increases experience of heritage, uniformity increases experience of digital interfaces. Multiple heritage resources available in the same, highly functional, highly usable interface is thus the greatest possible impact ...
… requiring implementation of content standards designed with usability in mind, not theoretical purity, and broad community adoption, not pet research projects. #LOUD#IIIF [and I’m done!]
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As an experiment, I looked at the description of the J Paul Getty Trust in wikidata. 4/11 assertions were wrong (business type, inception date, subsidiary, legal form), 1 meaningless (category), 1 redundant (LA is in USA). Description was very poor, and empty labels (Galician).
I corrected the data, but there’s no way to know if someone reverts my corrections. There’s no way to know if someone adds in more incorrect data. Not sure what the purpose of wikidata is - large amounts of inaccurate and incomplete data, that hasn’t adopted standard vocabularies
Yet libraries and other cultural heritage organizations are all 😍over it. The only thing I can see as an advantage is the nice auto-complete dropdowns for entering data, hardly an innovative feature and especially as it doesn’t validate the ontology, such as it is.