Digital Cultural and Heritage Collections of the Future: Enabling Innovative Access and Expanding Research

Wednesday November 02, 2022

From 8:30am to 2:30pm

Join us for this interactive workshop to shape the short- mid- and long-term future of our collective digital cultural and heritage collections. Learn about Canadiana, discuss the potential to transform it into community open infrastructure ready for collaborative collection development, hear from researchers about their needs, and help decide the path forward for CRKN’s digital cultural and heritage collections. This workshop will include a break with lunch provided.

This workshop will:

Reintroduce Canadiana and highlight the user-driven development undertaken to improve access to and functionality for the collection content
Introduce CRKN’s inaugural Researcher Council and showcase the work they are doing to ensure researcher needs are at the core of our future digital cultural and heritage infrastructure plans
Include facilitated discussions for member input on:
- What your institutions need from Canadiana
- How this infrastructure could enable transformative research
- What path to take for the future of CRKN’s digital cultural and heritage collections
Consider how to fund a sustainable future for this infrastructure based on the potential different paths forward.

The discussions held during the workshop will be foundational and support the next phase in the advancement of our collective and collaborative approach to digital cultural and heritage collections and infrastructure of the future that enables innovative access and expands research.

Time	Title	Speakers
7:30-8:30	Breakfast (provided)
8:30-8:35	Welcome	Clare Appavoo
8:35-9:30	CRKN’s Cultural and Heritage Collections and Infrastructure: Where We Are and Where We Are Going	Ken Hernden, Brittny Lapierre, Natalie MacDonald, Mark Jordan, Ian Milligan
9:30-10:45	CRKN’s Researcher Council: Findings to Date (includes Researcher Council lightning talks)	Susan Brown, Camille Callison, Dan Malleck, Alyssa Arbuckle, Maxime Gohier
10:45-11:00	Break
11:00-11:10	Future of CRKN's Heritage Program	Guylaine Beaudry
11:10-12:00	Digital Cultural and Heritage Collections of the Future: Enabling Innovative Access and Expanding Research	Facilitated Discussion with Rebecca Graham
12:00-1:00	Lunch (provided)
1:00-2:15	Digital Cultural and Heritage Collections of the Future: Enabling Innovative Access and Expanding Research	Facilitated Discussion with Rebecca Graham James MacGregor
2:15-2:30	Sustainability and Resourcing	Clare Appavoo

Researcher Council Lightning Talks

Presenter: Dan Malleck
Title: Policy, medicine, and historical sources: Confronting strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and “threats” of digital sources
Abstract: In this quick talk I will discuss how my use of digital historical sources has evolved and expanded, and what I see as the chance to provide a more comprehensive understanding of source material. I will begin with a brief overview of the main digital sources I use. I will then reflect on how using digital sources, both in research and teaching, may inadvertently limit historical understanding. I conclude by suggesting how leadership in the digital repository field could help to address such challenges.

Presenter: Maxime Gohier
Title: Digital New France: A Global Partnership Experience in Documentary Heritage Research and Data Management
Abstract: Launched in 2019, Digital New France is a partnership and collaborative research project that aims to equip research on New France with infrastructures and practices facilitating the free sharing of research data, their exploitation and analysis through advanced technological tools, as well as their responsible management in the short, medium and long term. Bringing together researchers from many disciplines, documentary heritage institutions and volunteers from the broad population, the project aims to gather, in a single digital repository, all the transcriptions of documents (handwritten or printed) produced by researchers, as well as the metadata added to these transcriptions, in order to share them by ensuring their interoperability, to store them in a perennial way, to make them accessible to the greatest number and to use them in order to develop new technologies based on machine learning (AI). By focusing on New France and by involving every actor concerned by this field of research, the project ambitions to cover, as far as possible, every angle of research on documentary heritage, in order to propose the most universal and efficient solutions, especially for analyzing handwritten documents.

Presenter: Alyssa Arbuckle
Title: Open Social Scholarship and the INKE Partnership
Abstract: The 21st century has brought dramatic shifts to the ways that knowledge is produced and circulated, largely characterized by online accessibility and social interaction. Academic-produced knowledge has not been exempt from this evolution. Situated squarely within evolving knowledge production, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership is a North American-based network of researchers, partners, librarians, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and research staff. The INKE Partnership is currently exploring open social scholarship: the creation, dissemination, and engagement of open research by specialists and non-specialists in accessible and significant ways. In this lightning talk, I will reflect on the theoretical basis and real-world impact of open social scholarship as well provide a quick overview of current INKE Partnership initiatives.

Presenter: Susan Brown
Title: Connecting Research to Cultural Content Online: The Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship
Abstract: The Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship (LINCS) is a cyberinfrastructure project funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation that will launch in the summer of 2023. LINCS is mobilizing scholarship about culture in the form of semantically structured data that will interlink with cultural content on the web. This presentation will provide a brief overview of LINCS, a glimpse of the kinds of linking it will enable across multiple sites, and some ideas about how it can contribute to the broader cultural knowledge ecosystem.

Advanced Reading Materials:

Digital Cultural and Heritage Collections of the Future: Enabling Innovative Access and Expanding Research (Discussion Questions)

Researcher Council Findings Themes Supplementary Examples