papers 3User participation Chair: Bart de Nil From a ‘DISH’ point of view (digital strategies for heritage), the discussion in this paper session will focus on user participation issues which have a strategic relevance for heritage organizations. - focus on the ‘critical success factors’ for user participation: what are the conditions, do’s or don’ts, to make user participation really work? Are there any crucial or determining (external and internal) factors to take into account when developing user involvement strategies?
- focus on the ‘added value’ of user participation: what makes it all worthwhile? Do the ‘profits’ counterbalance the costs (time and money) to implement tools to stimulate user participation? On what level does user participation create value (for the cultural heritage institution, the users, the public)?
- focus on the ‘knowledge chain’: what can we learn from a collaboration between professional expert users and other (expert) users? How do we create or harvest new knowledge resulting from this collaboration in a sustainable way? Should we abandon the dichotomy between concepts like ‘user generated content’ vs. ‘expert generated content’, or does the status of the information remains essential?
(The presented cases can serve as a starting point for the discussion.)
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Speaker: Dr. Isto Huvila The paper discusses preliminary findings and observations from an action research study on a participatory digital library and data archive for cultural heritage data with a specific focus on building archaeology. The project aims to develop a combined digital repository and collaboratory for research and cultural heritage management with a special emphasis on participation and semantically rich relations between individual digital artifacts. The discussed digital library is based on semantic wiki technology and developed together with archaeologists from a small Nordic archaeology consultancy. The findings of the study indicate that the principal challenges associated with the life-cycle approach relate to the paradox of formality and informality of documentation and to the implications the system has on the customary procedures of cultural heritage information work.
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Speaker: Lorna Richardson Our mashup www.thamesdiscovery.org combines Web 2.0 applications, hybridised open source software & online database system, ARK. Publically available for interrogation. 200+ project volunteers trained to use this technology, to share work amongst a geographically diverse group. Digital outreach project is unique in its use of Web 2.0 to disseminate archaeological information in the public domain. ---------------------------------------
This paper investigates the way in which Flemish cultural institutions make use of the possibilities offered by social media to communciate with their audiences and to promote themselves. To this end, an empirical study was conducted involving 14 Flemish cultural institutions. The study consisted in a survey by which these institutions were asked if they make use of social media, for which purposes they are using them, what their experience is with them and what they have learnt from the use of social media so far, what their audience reaction has been, if they see the added value of using social media to maintain the contact with their public and the way in which they can position themselves in the wider cultural Flemish context. On the basis of the results of this survey, the Facebook (FB) pages of 5 such institutions were compared. In this comparison, we looked at the content on each page, the updates, the degree of users' participation and some general demographics. From all this, we can conclude that the majority of the institutions that have been interviewed is now using social media or is planning to use them in the near future. They all consider the use fo social media very positively to promote themselves, to reach a broader public, especially a young public, and to reduce the distance between them and their traditional audiences. In this way, they become more accessible, transparent and may even adapt and respond better to their public needs and requests. Despite this positive attitude, it is not always that easy to integrate social media in the "normal" cultural communication. The biggest problem institutions are facing is the lack of time to maintain this form of communication and to keep up with its evolution. A striking resutls from the Facebook analysis is that women are more active than men on the FB groups of cultural institutions. Although the results presented in this paper only pertain a very limited sample of Flemish cultural institutions, they are interesting to highlight what is happening in the Flemish cultural scene and can serve as a starting point for further research.
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Bart De Nil is a historian who worked in 1998 at the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature. From 1999 until 2007 he worked at the Institute for Social History. There he combined the tasks of researcher, archivist and coordinator oral history. Currently he’s senior staff member at FARO, Flemish interface centre for cultural heritage, mainly working about digital heritage and archives. Within the context of FARO Bart supports research projects about cultural heritage in Flanders. He is also engaged within the heritage sector as volunteer. Bart has published numerous articles and books on various subjects.
Dr. Isto Huvila is working as a post-doc research fellow (forskarassistent) at the department of ALM (Archives, Museums and Libraries/Information Science) of the Uppsala University in Sweden, is as an adjunct researcher at the Information Studies department of the Åbo Akademi University in Turku, Finland, and an independent consultant. His primary areas of research include information work, information management, knowledge organisation, cultural heritage information, participation in archives and documents management and library 2.0 related issues such as information service, information literacy and information in virtual worlds. Huvila has published broadly on the topics ranging from information work management, archaeological information management, virtual reality information issues to the museum informatics and ancient history and archaeology. He received a MA degree in cultural history at the University of Turku in 2002 and a PhD degree in information studies at the Åbo Akademi University (Turku, Finland) in 2006.
Lorna Richardson is the archaeology outreach officer for the Thames Discovery Programme in London. She has a BA in Medieval Archaeology, and has just completed an MA in Public Archaeology, both at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL. 
