Abstract. In recent years there has been a marked uptake in the digitisation of cultural heritage collections. Though this has enabled more sources to be made available to experts and the wider public, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with cultural archives. This is largely due to the monolithic nature of many digital archives; the challenge of understanding large collections, especially if the language is inconsistent; and because users vary in expertise and have different tasks and goals that they are trying to accomplish. This paper describes CULTURA, an FP7 funded project that is addressing these specific issues. The various technologies and approaches being used by CULTURA are discussed, along with the lessons learnt thus far, and the future work necessary to be implemented before the project concludes.

Abstract. The increased digitisation of cultural collections, and their availability on the World Wide Web, has made access to these valuable documents much easier than ever before. However, despite the increased availability of access to cultural archives, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with these resources. The CULTURA project is actively addressing this issue through the development of a metadata-driven personalisation environment for navigating cultural collections and instigating collaborations. The corpus agnostic CULTURA environment also supports a full spectrum of users: ranging from professional researchers seeking patterns in the data and trying to answer complex queries; to interested members of the public who need help navigating a vast collection of resources. This paper discusses the state of the art in this area and the various innovative approaches used in the CULTURA project, with a special focus on how the underlying metadata helps facilitate its semantically rich environment.

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The increased digitisation of cultural collections and their availability on the World Wide Web has made access to these valuable documents much easier than ever before. However, despite the increased availability of access to cultural archives, curators still struggle to instigate and enhance engagement with these resources. The CULTURA project is actively addressing this issue through the development of a metadata-driven personalisation environment for exploring cultural collections and instigating collaborations. This paper discusses the state of the art in this area and the various innovative approaches used in the CULTURA project, with a special focus on how the underlying metadata helps to facilitate its semantically rich environment. An evaluation of the CULTURA project with students is detailed, highlighting its relevance for those without domain expertise. This is vital as the system needs to adapt and support a full spectrum of users, from professional researchers to interested members of the public.

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