"Digital Dreams: Information Technology, Social History Research and the Future of Archives, Museums and Libraries"

The use of computers and information technology in museums, archives and libraries has been going on for several years now, however in a number of aspects the digital era in the sector is only beginning, both in the way of opportunities (think Augmented Reality) or as a threat (think Digital Dark Age). The emerging new IT technologies are challenging and changing the traditional policies of museums, archives and research institutes. Smartphones, networks and GIS technologies open up dazzling new opportunities of transmission of our collections and new communication strategies. But will the digital era be a dream or a nightmare? At what cost will it come? Will the new technologies be global or rather widen the gap with the South?

How will IT change the agenda, methods and needs of research, collection management and public programmes in the domain of labour and social history? Can digital technology open up closed collections of workers’ culture or help us bring the history of the labour movement to a larger audience? The international conference Digital Dreams will bring together museum curators, collection managers and researchers in the field of social history to jointly discuss common issues of existing and emerging digital opportunities. The conference will not be limited to theoretical approaches but will also consider best practices and best cases and look for prospects of collaboration on joint research projects.

Special attention will be given to the implementation of technologies that will further open up our collections for research (think Linked Open Data). This is undoubtedly a two way lane: research will help archives, libraries and museums to collect and preserve the collections in innovating ways (think Crowd Sourcing) and to disseminate cultural heritage to new and much broader user groups (think Virtual Exhibitions). On the other hand, virtualization, digitization and cloud technologies will offer new opportunities to researchers on an unseen scale (think Text Mining).

The conference Digital Dreams is organized by IALHI-International Association of Labour History Institutions and Worklab-International Association of Labour Museums, with the support of ITH-International Conference of Labour and Social History and ELHN-European Labour History Network. Hosted in Ghent, Belgium by Amsab-Institute of Social History.

We encourage museum practitioners, archivists and researchers to submit papers that relate to the wide theme of the application of IT technologies to the preservation and transmission of cultural heritage collections and social and labour history research. We welcome theoretical and methodological approaches and challenges as well as presentations of cases, tools and best practices. Papers presented to the conference are encouraged to deal with one or some of the following topics:

• The Virtual Museum: Electronic Guides and Digital Exhibitions
• Hypercities: Virtual Walking and Augmented Reality
• Cyberspaces: Blogs, Mashups and Social Media
• In The Cloud: Electronic Journals and Digital Publishing
• Distant Reading and Blended Teaching
• User Acceptance Testing: How to Poll Your Public and Get Feedback?
• Games For Heritage
• Best Practices of Digitization
• The Born-Digital Issue
• Long Term Storage, Digital Vaults and Persistent IDs
• The Meta-World of Metadata
• A New Era Of Licensing: Public Domain and Open Access
• The Challenge of Acquisition: What Are Digital Depositors Expecting?
• Crowdsourcing and You
• E-Collaboratories and Virtual Research Platforms
• Data Mining, Statistics and Data Visualization
• Text Analysis, Topic Modelling and Natural Language Processing
• Geo-data, Cartographic Modelling and GIS
• Linked Open Data, Wikidata and Wikipedia
• The Production of Meaning: OCR, Text Encoding and the Semantic Web
• Multilingual in a Global World: Translation and Transcription

The Call for Papers is open until 30 June 2017. If you would like to present your project please send your proposal (500 words) along with a brief professional profile (150 words) to: ialhi2017(at)amsab.be. Conference participation is without a fee, however travel and accommodation costs are at your expense. 

IALHI brings together more than hundred archives, libraries and research centres in the field of social and labour history from all over the world. The network organises an annual conference for its members where expertise on cases and practices is exchanged. IALHI also hosts the Social History Portal (http://www.socialhistoryportal.org), which contains more than two million records of its members’ catalogues and organises a widely read News Service. WORKLAB provides a forum for museums collecting and conserving working class culture, work processes and the labour movement. The network coordinates the interests of its members and publishes a newsletter. More info at http://worklab.info). This conference is the first event where IALHI and WORKLAB are working together.

More info at http://www.ialhi.org