15-16 December 2009, Florence - Italy.

Following the success of the previous conference held in 2006, the Foundation Rinascimento Digitale, in collaboration with the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and the Library of Congress, is delighted to announce the 2nd edition: “CULTURAL HERITAGE online Empowering users: an active role for user communities”. The conference aims to explore, analyze, and evaluate the state of the art and future trends in user communities and cultural contents on the web from an international perspective, and bring together academic researchers, policy makers and practitioners, providing a forum for the discussion and dissemination of the selected themes.

Internet continues to have an impressive impact on cultural heritage and humanist communities by affecting the way they work, use, exchange and produce knowledge. New architectures and radically different paradigms arise continuously engendering a deep rethinking of traditional roles and tasks. Though a continuous increase in ICT use has spread in the cultural heritage community, cultural institutions have been slower to adopt new technologies for cultural, economic and organizational reasons. Today it seems that users not only are able to adapt to technological changes faster than cultural institutions, but they are also driving innovation, by proposing new ideas and building up new paradigms of knowledge production.

The conference will start on the 15th of December with keynote lectures that investigate user needs and expectations, analysing how to better involve users and the cultural heritage community in creating and sharing digital resources. The plenary session on the 16th will start with the presentation of national and international scenarios, followed by two thematic sessions with scientific speeches selected through a Call for Papers.

Main Topics
• Cultural heritage and interactive Web
• Digital libraries
• Digital humanities
• Cooperation among museums, archives, libraries
• Digital preservation

Who should attend
• Cultural heritage institutions administrators and curators
• Digital humanities researchers and students
• Cultural tourism operators
• Professional associations in the fields of museums, archives, libraries
• Funding agencies
• Technology providers and developers

Full programme : http://rinascimento-digitale.it/conference2009