Digitising Cultural Heritage
British Museum: Stevenson Lecture Theatre.
Saturday 4th September 2010, 09:55 – 16:30
Digital technology has revolutionised modern work- and social life. It is also transforming cultural heritage management. The power to store, organise and distribute vast quantities of complex data makes possible today things that only 20 years ago were dreams. This study day brings together a selection of projects that embrace the potential of the digital world to broaden and enrich access to mankind’s shared cultural heritage.
The British Museum’s founding philosophy–free access for ‘all studious and curious Persons’–today means not just free entry to the museum in Bloomsbury, but also free access to the collection online. An increasing community of institutions and projects share this philosophy, and the past is no longer such a foreign country.
Programme:
9:55 welcome: Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum
10:00-10:30 British Museum Collections Online
Julia Stribblehill, British Museum
10:30-11:00 The International Dunhuang Project
Sam van Schaik, British Library
11:00-11:30 TEA BREAK
11:30-12:00 Vindolanda Tablets Online
Alan Bowman, University of Oxford
12:00-12:30 Integrating Digital Papyrology
Gabriel Bodard, Kings College London
12:30-1:30 LUNCH BREAK
1:30-2:00 The Ashurbanipal Library Project
Jon Taylor, British Museum
2:00-2:30 The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus
Steve Tinney, University of Pennsylvania
2:30-3:00 Persistent Digital Archives in Cuneiform Research and Cultural Heritage Management
Robert K. Englund, UCLA
3:00-3:30 TEA BREAK
3:30-4:00 The Syrian Digital Library of Cuneiform
Bertrand Lafont, CNRS, Paris
4:00-4:30 Cooperation among Research Institutes and Museums – The Digital Edge
Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin
The projects highlighted in the afternoon session all belong to an international collaboration that currently benefits from funding from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Those in the morning session have also benefited from funding from the same source. In addition to the projects listed in the programme, related projects will be represented in poster displays in the foyer.
Further details will appear at What’s On soon. Please contact Jon Taylor (jjtaylor@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk) with any enquiries.
