Recent developments in cultural heritage image databases : Directions for user-centered design
Christie Stephenson · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1999
FROM1995 THROUGH 1997, SEVEN CULTURAL HERITAGE repositories and seven universities collaborated on an extensive demonstration project called the Museum Educational Site Licensing Project (MESL) to explore the administrative, technical, and pedagogical issues involved in making digital museum images and information available to educational audiences.This article reviews the MESL project's methods and findings in a number of areas-descriptive metadata, database design, interface design, and tools for use.It discusses more recent development efforts in extending the model for digital image delivery of visual resources to higher education audiences.Finally, it suggests how to proceed by posing a number of usercentered questions about the design goals for networked access to the vast visual resources of the cultural heritage community.Selected projects from the literature of computer and information science are discussed to stimulate thinking about avenues for research and to focus project design goals.