Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH) workshop
http://www.lsi.uned.es/IACH2008/

September 18, 2008, Aarhus, Denmark.

Organised in conjunction with the 12th European Conference On Research And
Advanced Technology For Digital Libraries (ECDL 2008)
http://www.ecdl2008.org

The Information Access to Cultural Heritage (IACH) workshop held in
conjunction with ECDL 2008 will bring together academics carrying out
research in the area of information access and practitioners working in the
cultural heritage field. The goal of the workshop is promoting exchange of
ideas concerning creation, curation, storage, retrieval and use of cultural
heritage information. In particular, the workshop will focus on the question
of how the keepers of cultural heritage resources can improve information
access by applying information technology and principles currently being
developed in the area of information access.
Following current trends, users are actively engaging with cultural heritage
on the web, prompting heritage institutions to stimulate communities to grow
around them. The workshop places an additional emphasis on active user
participation, which creates new modes of access and contextualisation.
These are challenging developments for cultural heritage organisations, due
both to the variety and richness of cultural heritage resources and to the
diverse range of users with varying information needs and search behaviors.

Issues in the scope of the workshop include:

1. Emerging communities of users of cultural heritage information

* User generated content and metadata
* Online user communities
* Drawing in wider audiences for cultural heritage collections
* Understanding and modeling diverse user needs
* User interaction and interface design
* Visualization of cultural heritage resources

2. Information retrieval technology for improved access to cultural heritage
resources

* Exploiting user contributions in the representation and indexing of
cultural heritage information
* Retrieval of structured and unstructured text
* Multimedia retrieval (images, video, audio,...)
* Access to distributed repositories
* Access to multilingual resources
* Evaluation and test collections

3. Innovative solutions for accessing cultural heritage on-line

* Case studies

4. Panel session focused on identifying key challenges facing access to
cultural information today.

* Position papers

We welcome the submission poster papers, position papers (for panel
participation) and extended abstracts (i.e., proposals for full papers)
which should be written in English and prepared according to the Springer
LNCS format guidelines. Submissions should be a maximum of 2 pages and
manuscripts should be in PDF format. For further information, see
http://www.lsi.uned.es/IACH2008/

Important Dates:
Call for papers: April 8, 2008
Abstracts for full length papers: June 8, 2008 Full Poster Papers/Full
Position papers due: June 8, 2008
Notification: July 8, 2008
Final version full papers due: August 18, 2008
Workshop: September 18, 2008

with best regards,
The IACH 2008 Organising Committee

Martha Larson, University of Amsterdam
Johan Oomen, Sound & Vision,
Kate Fernie
Juan Manuel Cigarren Recuero, UNED