The premier volume of the Annual Review of Cultural Heritage Informatics (ARCHI), edited by Samantha Kelly Hastings, is the polestar publication for cultural heritage scholars, professionals, and students. Featuring sixteen original works selected by the distinguished editorial board of international scholars, ARCHI presents a broad spectrum of the cultural heritage informatics field. Whether one is interested in cultural heritage preservation, digitization, digital humanities, user behavior, technology, or educational practices, ARCHI is the central source for current and emerging trends in the rapidly expanding cultural heritage informatics field. Major sections include Best Practices, Digital Communities, Education, Field Reports, and Technology: - Best Practices contributors, such as distinguished scholars Michèle V. Cloonan, Martha Mahard, Daniel Gelaw Alemneh, Abebe Rorissa, Jeannette A. Bastian, and Ross Harvey, explore the increasingly converging, distributed, and pluralistic nature of digital cultural heritage and suggest new perspectives on traditional preservation and access methodologies. - Digital Communities authors emphasize the role of cultural maps in interpreting digital representations and advocate for the preservation of digital cultural discourse. - Education offerings include an exploration of a current cultural heritage informatics educational program and an analysis of educational resources available to local history and genealogy collection librarians. - Field Reports case studies include active digitization programs, cultural heritage preservation initiatives, and developing cultural heritage research agendas in Ethiopia, Pennsylvania (U.S.), Australia, and Romania. - Technology for promoting the accessibility and preservation of cultural heritage is explored from the specific perspectives of a digital humanities virtual reality application, identification of a metric enabling libraries and archives to invoke analog video reproduction rights under the United States Copyright Act, folksonomies and other social networking tools as finding aid extensions, and a review of digital collection user studies. In addition to the five major sections, a nascent sixth, Reviews, section is introduced and the vision charted for its expansion in future volumes. Providing a compendium of current research, educational initiatives, and best practices, ARCHI is a pivotal resource for cultural heritage informatics scholars, practitioners, and students. By challenging readers to explore a variety of contexts and offering critical evaluation of conventional practices, ARCHI promotes new ideas and offers new pathways of development for the cultural heritage informatics field.
About the Author: Dr. S. K. Hastings joined the faculty at the University of South Carolina, School of Library and Information Science as director and professor in August 2006. Previously she directed the digital image management program of study at the University of North Texas, School of Library and Information Sciences and served as interim dean 2004-2005. She holds a MLIS from USF Tampa and a Ph.D. from Florida State. Sam's research interests in the retrieval of digital images, cultural heritage, telecommunications and evaluation of networked information services influence how she views the changing roles for information professionals. "Without library and information scientists, there is little hope that people will be able to find the information and knowledge needed to flourish in the digital environment." Sam tries to integrate real world experiences as reflected by teamwork and product development in all of her classes that range from research methods to digital image management. Sam has worked as a consultant and built full-text and image databases for accountants, dentists, doctors, lawyers and county and state governments. Along the way, Sam has worked to help public libraries and museums connect to the Internet and share their cultural objects in a digital environment. Her current research explores the use of 3D digital objects in learning environments. She served as president of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (www.asist.org) in 2004 and served five years as the acquisitions editor for the ASIS&T Monograph series. She will be President of The Association for Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE) in 2015.