NBU Digital Collection “Bulgarian Cultural Heritage Materials”

Our experience in maintaining digital collections is described, which urged us to go deep in the process and build centralized digitalization policy. It instigated developing new strategy, adopting new technological solutions and staff training. The emphasis falls is placed on our digital collection “Bulgarian Cultural Heritage Materials” as an example of a focused digitization at the New Bulgarian University (NBU) Library and our answer to modern trends in launching digital collections. Our future digitization plans are also discussed.

3D Laser Scanning for Digital Preservation and Dissemination of Cultural Heritage Main scanned objects - Four Temples of Different Religions in Sofia

The project demonstrates the use of modern technologies for preservation and presentation of the cultural and historical heritage. The idea is a database of cultural and historical heritage sites to be created applying three dimensional laser scanning technology and a combination of geodetic and photogrammetric methods and shooting techniques. For the purposes of carrying out this project, we have focused on some heritage sites in the central part of Sofia. We decided to include these particular buildings because of the fact that there is hardly another city in the world where within a radius of 400 m are located four temples of different religions - Jewish, Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic. In the recent years, preservation of cultural heritage has been increasingly linked to objectives of sustainable development. Today, it has become clear that cultural heritage is also an economic resource that should be used for further economic development (through compulsory preservation of its authentic cultural values). There has been a more active public debate on the role of cultural heritage, regarding the following topics: improving the quality of life through development of cultural tourism, leading to an increase of the employment rate, constantly improving the business climate, etc. Cultural heritage preservation is becoming one of the priority objectives of the urban development policy. The focus has been shifted to new ways of preservation, mainly combinations of sophisticated technological solutions and their application for the purposes of preservation and dissemination of the cultural heritage.

Partner Projects of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv on Digitization of Cultural and Historical Heritage

Digitization offers excellent opportunities for the preservation and safe-keeping of valuable library collections. The article recounts the first coordinated attempts of “Ivan Vazov” Public Library – Plovdiv at digitizing some of its treasured collections such as manuscripts, early printed books and archives through partner projects and revealing them to the world community.

Cultural Heritage Archives on Bulgarian National Radio Platforms

The article describes radio archives as cultural heritage and presents their practical use as integrated resources on different radio platforms. The current situation and plans for the Bulgarian National Radio (BNR) for preserving and using these repositories are discussed.

The Future of the Next-Generation Internet and Possible Applications into Education and Culture Heritage

There are several initiatives such as: US Ignite, Software Defined Networking (SDN), OpenFlow, Global Environment for Network Innovation (GENI), WiMAX and Internet 2 dealing with the future of the internet. The goal of the paper is to understand the goals, intricacies, and nuances of some of these techniques and show some of the possibilities of next-generation high-speed networking and their applications into education and culture heritage.

Linguistic Corpora as International Cultural Heritage: The Corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian Parallel Texts

The paper relates about our ongoing work on the creation of a corpus of Bulgarian and Ukrainian parallel texts. We discuss some differences in the approaches and the interpretation of some concepts, as well as various problems associated with the construction of our corpus, in particular the occasional ‘nonparallelism’ of original and translated texts. We give examples of the application of the parallel corpus for the study of lexical semantics and note the outstanding role of the corpus in the lexicographic description of Ukrainian and Bulgarian translation equivalents. We draw attention to the importance of creating parallel corpora as objects of national as well as global cultural heritage.

Web-application for Presentation of Bulgarian Language Heritage: Bilingual Digital Corpora and Dictionaries

The paper describes three software packages - the main components of a software system for processing and web-presentation of Bulgarian language resources – parallel corpora and bilingual dictionaries. The author briefly presents current versions of the core components “Dictionary” and “Corpus” as well as the recently developed component “Connection” that links both “Dictionary” and “Corpus”. The components main functionalities are described as well. Some examples of the usage of the system’s web-applications are included.

Visible and Invisible Bulgarian Heritage (One research under the Bulgarian Heritage published on the Web)

This paper dials with presentations of the Bulgarian Cultural and Historical Heritage in the Cyberspace. The study was taking place at the Information management course with bachelor students in Information Technologies, Information Brokerage and Information Security at the University of Library Studies and Information Technologies. The students describe about 300 different objectives – cultural and historical, material and immaterial.

Preserving Cultural Heritage Using Open Source Collection Management Tools

Open source software (OSS) popularity is growing steadily and many OSS systems could be used to preserve cultural heritage objects. Such solutions give the opportunity to organizations to afford the development of a digital collection. This paper focuses on reviewing two OSS tools, CollectionSpace and the Open Video Digital Library Toolkit and discuss on how these could be used for organizing digital replicas of cultural objects. The features of the software are presented and some examples are given.

Recovering Valuable Artifacts of the Cultural Heritage through Modern Technology and Equipment

This paper presents the digital reconstruction of the carving of the iconostasis of the Assumption church in the town of Bansko in its original form, a research project of the Department of Mathematical Linguistics of the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Trends in Digital Cultural Heritage Management and Applications

We present some recent trends in the field of digital cultural heritage management and applications including digital cultural data curation, interoperability, open linked data publishing, crowd sourcing, visualization, platforms for digital cultural heritage, and applications. We present some examples from research and development projects of MUSIC/TUC in those areas.

Supporting and Enhancing Research on Cultural Heritage in France: the PATRIMA Project

In this paper, we first overview the French project on heritage called PATRIMA, launched in 2011 as one of the Projets d'investissement pour l'avenir, a French funding program meant to last for the next ten years. The overall purpose of the PATRIMA project is to promote and fund research on various aspects of heritage presentation and preservation. Such research being interdisciplinary, research groups in history, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science are involved in this project. The PATRIMA consortium involves research groups from universities and from the main museums or cultural heritage institutions in Paris and surroundings. More specifically, the main members of the consortium are the two universities of Cergy-Pontoise and Versailles Saint-Quentin and the following famous museums or cultural institutions: Musée du Louvre, Château de Versailles, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Musée du Quai Branly, Musée Rodin. In the second part of the paper, we focus on two projects funded by PATRIMA named EDOP and Parcours and dealing with data integration. The goal of the EDOP project is to provide users with a data space for the integration of heterogeneous information about heritage; Linked Open Data are considered for an effective access to the corresponding data sources. On the other hand, the Parcours project aims at building an ontology on the terminology about the techniques dealing with restoration and/or conservation. Such an ontology is meant to provide a common terminology to researchers using different databases and different vocabularies.

PanamaTipico.com: a Born Digital Initiative for Researching and Preserving Panama’s Cultural Heritage

This paper reflects on the experience of PanamaTipico.com, an independent website specialized in the research and preservation of the cultural heritage of the Republic of Panama, a developing country located in Central America. Basic information about the project is described. Also discussed, are some of the challenges confronted by the project and the results achieved. The goal of this paper is to encourage a discussion on whether or not the experience of Pan-amaTipico.com is comparable to the experiences of similar projects in developing countries in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

Augmented Reality as a Method for Expanded Presentation of Objects of Digitized Heritage

Augmented reality is the latest among information technologies in modern electronics industry. The essence is in the addition of advanced computer graphics in real and/or digitized images. This paper gives a brief analysis of the concept and the approaches to implementing augmented reality for an expanded presentation of a digitized object of national cultural and/or scientific heritage. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): H.5.1, H.5.3, I.3.7.

Learner support and discovery in a virtual non-judgmental environment

This thesis is a qualitative case study that draws upon a grounded genre analysis approach situated within the social constructivist paradigm. The study describes the various obligatory, desired, and optional moves used by post-graduate students as they interacted within an online, non-judgmental environment in order to seek solutions to issues they were experiencing with their research projects or teaching. The postgraduate students or case participants met individually online with me at pre-arranged times to take part in Instant Messenger Cooperative Development (IMCD) (Boon, 2005) 30-minute to one hour sessions via the text-chat function of Skype. Participants took on the role of ‘Explorer’ in order to articulate their thoughts and ideas about their research. I took on the role of ‘Understander’ to provide support to each Explorer by reflecting my understanding of the ongoing articulations as the Explorers investigated their specific issues, determined possible ways to overcome them, made new discoveries, and formulated plans of action regarding the best way for them to move forward. The description of generic moves covers 32 IMCD sessions collected over a threeyear period (2009-2012) from 10 different participants (A-J). Data collected is drawn from live IMCD sessions, field notes, and post-session email feedback from participants. In particular, the thesis focuses on describing the specific generic moves of Explorers within IMCD sessions as they seek satisfactory resolutions to particular research or pedagogic puzzles. It also provides a detailed description of a longitudinal case (Participant A – four sessions), a one-session case (Participant B – one session), and an outlier case in which the Explorer underwent a negative IMCD experience. The thesis concludes by arguing that IMCD is a highly effective tool that helps facilitate the research process for both distance-learning and on-campus students and has the potential to be utilized across all disciplines at the tertiary level.