Association for Information Systems (AIS)

Special Interest Group (SIG) e-culture

Pre-ICIS 05 (Las Vegas, USA) Academic Workshop

“Cultural Heritage and Open Tourism”

Sunday december, 11^th, 2005

SIG e-culture

CALL FOR PAPERS

See last year’s papers of the pre-ICIS 04 in Washington

Under the high patronage of:

· Rick Watson, University of Georgia, USA, President of AIS

· Claudia Loebbecke, University of Cologne, Germany, President-Elect of AIS

Program chairs

· Gabriele Piccoli, Cornell University, USA

· Bernard Frisher, University of Virginia and UCLA, USA

Organization chairs

· Marianna Sigala, The University of Aegean, Greece, m.sigala@aegean.gr

· Oleg Missikoff, LUISS University, Rome, Italy, omissikoff@luiss.it

Deadline: September, 30

Program committee :

· Marie-Claude Boudreau, University of Georgia, USA

· Alessandro d’Atri, LUISS University, Rome, Italy

· Henri Isaac, Paris Dauphine University, France

· Hajer Kefi, Paris Dauphine University, France

· Heinz Klein, State University of New York at Binghamton, USA

· Karen Loch, Georgia State University, USA

· Miltiadis Lytras, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece

· Marco de Marco, Universita Catholica, Milan, Italy

· Emmanuel Monod, Paris Dauphine University, France

· Peggy Papadopoulou, University of Athens; Greece

· Arjan Raven, Georgia State University, USA

· Detmar Straub, Georgia State University, USA

CALL

“Cultural heritage and tourism” covers a wide range of research areas including :

· Cultural heritage information systems,

· e-culture

· Virtual heritage and digital heritage

· Ubiquitous commerce applied to cultural heritage

· Ubiquitous tourism

· Mobile technologies applied to tourism and cultural heritage

· Open systems in tourism and cultural heritage

· Ubiquitous computing applied to tourism

· Computer applications for archaeology.

These research areas are dealing with the usage of Information Systems (IS) cultural heritage institutions and tourism institutions. Cultural heritage institutions include museums, archives, libraries and also archeological sites. Typical types of IS involved in cultural heritage and tourism are ubiquitous commerce (u-commerce) systems, open systems, mobile technologies and virtual reality.

Traditionally, cultural heritage institutions are driven by a service ideal, because they have a special commitment to serve the public at large. They are also often public administrations. In this respect, e-culture is close to e-administration. In accordance with this mission, they would tend to provide free access to cultural heritage resources. Historically, these institutions have been suspicious of any commercial exploitation of the cultural heritage, because they were especially afraid of a vulgarization of this heritage. However, two phenomena tend to challenge this classical mission: (i) the need to raise financial resources independently from public funding, and (ii) the increasing request from the users and tourists for high quality and value added services.

At the other extreme of the range of opions, potential investors and IT companies must justify the return on investment of any project. Companies have to consider their investments in the field of cultural heritage not only as philanthropic programs, but also as marketing and sales operations. While, indeed, many cultural heritage institutions in Europe operate on a non-profit basis, the situation is different in the USA and Canada. Moreover, the companies developing IT for cultural heritage are all commercial.

A common ground for the two logics of service vs. economic viability, is that cultural heritage institutions are the guardians of trusted knowledge, which needs to be maintained for many purposes such as[A1] education, tourism, or even entertainment. Indeed, for these institutions, the combination of financial and marketing trends creates a “go commercial” pressure that obliges them to change at least their business model. For instance, the museums have to move from mere collections to narrative connections between displays and to providing new experiences for the visitors. At a national level, even if cultural heritage represents a direct contribution of only 8% of the world-wide GDP, when countries like France, Spain of Italy are ranked among the first worldwide revenue for tourism, cultural heritage does play an important economic role[A2] . (Digicult report, 2003)

In this context, it should be noted that Information Technologies (IT) have been used in the past primarily for their transactional potential, instance, e.g. ticketing, because their contribution to the appreciation[A3] of the content has been extremely limited. For instance, an estimated 95% of all cultural heritage institutions in Europe have not been and currently still are NOT in a position of participating in any kind of digital cultural heritage venture. They not only lack the financial resources to participate, but also have a shortage of staff, essential skills, and the necessary technologies. (Virtual Heritage, 2004).

This might appear extremely frustrating when a growing number of Information Technologies may have an important contribution to make to the to the appreciation of cultural heritage. Among these technologies are mobile technologies, ubiquitous computing and networks, virtual reality technologies, hypermedia, data compression, data mining, OLAP or rich media.

This is why not only IT but also Information Systems (IS) needs to play a key role in the evolution of cultural heritage institution. Rethinking processes like knowledge management, content creation and management or customer relationship management might help to analyze the possible adaptation of cultural heritage contents to market needs. IS as a disciplines has addressed not only IT and processes, but also organizational transformation, project management, ontologies and change management.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to) :

· u-commerce in tourism and cultural heritage

· open systems in tourism and cultural heritage

· Mobile technologies in tourism and cultural heritage

· Personalization, individualization, Data mining, one to one marketing and cultural heritage

· Theoretical background for cultural heritage transformation

· Marketing of art and Information Technologies

· Virtual Reality and Cultural Heritage

· Cultural Heritage Information Systems

· Ontology and KM in culture

· E-learning in tourism and cultural heritage

AIS SIG e-culture website : http://cis.gsu.edu/~emonod/e-culture/

Open Tourism website : http://www.opentourism.org

instructions to authors

Final manuscripts in English should be submitted electronically to Oleg Missikoff, LUISS University of Rome, at omissikoff@luiss.it

Preparation of the manuscript

Authors are urged to write as concisely as possible. Submissions should be line spaced at 1.5 with wide margins on one side of the page. A manuscript, which should not have less than 2000 words and should not exceed 4000 words. It should consist of the sections listed below.

Title page: This should include in the following order of presentation: title of paper, suggested running headline of not more than 45 characters including spaces, followed by the author's name, department, institution, city, country and number of words. A second copy of the title page should be provided without the author's details to facilitate 'blind' refereeing.

Abstract : 20 to 100 words

Keywords : a list of 5 to 10 keywords is expected

Main text: The text should begin on a new page, preceded by a short abstract, and a list of between four and six keywords should be provided for guidance. All pages should be numbered consecutively including the title page.

Author biographies: A biography for each author of about 100-200 words should be supplied as a separate file, including email addresses of all authors.

Copyright

Submission of a paper will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished work, not under consideration for publication elsewhere.