Reanimating Cultural Heritage through Service Orientation, Workflows, Social Networking and Mashups

This paper presents an approach for creating a digital heritage resource that utilizes web services, workflows, social networks and Web 2.0 mash up technologies to innovate 'digital curatorship' in relation to collections dispersed in a global museum scape; community participation is achieved through social networking. We propose the integration of social networking technologies with a system called ARCO to allow communities to build digital heritage exhibitions online. With our system, digital heritage objects are reanimated in digital space through images, video clips, sounds, texts and other media (including 3D) within a virtual exhibition space, and thereby given new life. The focus of this paper is to primarily show how we can effectively integrate user generated heritage content with museum collections online; reconnecting objects in collections to disparate communities.