Cultural Heritage

I received an announcement a few days ago informing me that the papers presented at the Culture Online 2009 Conference  are now available on the Culture Online 2009 Conference Web site.

There are quite a number of papers which are likely to be of interest, covering the conference themes of Digital library applications & interactive Web and Sustainable policies for digital culture preservation. In addition to these to these papers, the speakers slidesarealso available, together with the slides for invited presentations.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that these resources are only available on the conference Web site, and only in PDF format.  So that slides haven’t been uploaded to a slide-sharing service such as Slideshare or Authorstream which would enable the resources to be embedded elsewhere (such as in blog posts).  And since the original format for the slides (which was almost universally PowerPoint) is not available, it would be difficult for the slides to be reused.

To have the slides hosted on the conference Web site is sensible – for the slides for a conference which had a strong focus on Web 2.0 not to make use of a service such as Slideshare to enable this content to be more easily reused is, I feel, a mistake.

A blog was also used to support the conference – but despite the calls for speakers and delegates to make use of the blog, only six posts were published.  The blog was used, however, to provide access to abstracts of the papers and speaker details.