A platform for safeguarding cultural memory: the QueryLab prototype
Maria Teresa Artese and Isabella Gagliardi
CNR – IMATI Milano, Italy
MEMORIAMEDIA Review 4. Art.2. 2019
photo: QueryLab / Memória Imaterial edition
The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage led to a proliferation of ICH websites on dialects, music, dance, traditional customs, knowledges, and other cultural expressions. These great number of websites, together with the impossibility to navigate and search them altogether, is the starting point of QueryLab, a prototype dedicated to the integration, navigation, search and preservation of intangible heritage archives in a single framework on the web, with the possibility for users to save their results in virtual private or shared inventories, to contribute to the dissemination and promotion of ICH, and to keep it alive. The analysis of ICH inventories on the web has led to the definition of ICH-light, a minimal metadata structure able to act as a platform for safeguarding cultural memory. The system presented here has been completely designed and some features have been implemented and tested with users, who have appreciated them.
Keywords: common metadata structure, integration of ICH archives, search, browse, and navigate tools.