Process-centric Cataloguing of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Museums and archives collect and store documentation of processes of intangible cultural heritage (ICH), such as craftsmanship skills, acts, and events recorded in videos, audio tapes, manuscripts, photos, and transcriptions. Such recordings are typically catalogued in an object-centric way as documents, using schemas such as Dublin Core. Also in event-centric models the focus has been on tangible cultural heritage. In this article we point out the importance of cataloguing not only the documentation object or related events, but the actual cultural process, such as a craftsmanship skill. Using special process-centric metadata for ICH, one can search for information about the elements and parts of intangible processes, not only documentation objects. Furthermore, process descriptions can be linked to related tangible and intangible objects in collections and Linked Data repositories on the web, facilitating rich and detailed semantic recommendations to end-users. To test and evaluate this idea, we created a metadata model for representing cultural processes, and applied it to the video documentation of traditional shoemaking with visualization and real time semantic recommendations on the CultureSampo portal. 1. Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage Intangible cultural heritage (ICH) means “...the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage. This intangible cultural heritage, transmitted from generation to generation, is constantly recreated by communities and groups in response to their interaction with nature and their history, and provides them with a sense of identity and continuity, thus promoting respect for cultural diversity and human creativity...” The domains of ICH are aural traditions and expressions like language, performing arts, social practices, rituals and festive events, knowledge and practices concerning nature and universe, and traditional craftsmanship with tacit knowledge. Documenting and safeguarding this heritage, and encouragement to preserve also all perishable records, notably electronic and documentary heritage resources ICH is connected to the tangible, sometime very strongly, like in the case of craftsmanship, which is a production process involving materials, equipment and end products. Intangible heritage can even be defined as the actual interpretations made in relation to objects. , emphasize the need of special cataloguing metadata and solutions in cataloguing systems. In this way the knowledge of processes would be more searchable and interoperable.