Owlery: A Flexible Content Management System for “Growing Metadata” of Cultural Heritage Objects and Its Educational Use in the CEAX Project

With the Educational use of Cultural heritage Archives and Cross(X) search (CEAX), we have investigated how to establish a framework for managing various kinds of information on cultural heritage objects and how to utilize them for educational purposes. To achieve this goal, we propose a conceptual framework in this paper called “Growing Metadata” and a flexible content management system called Owlery. Growing Metadata includes not only factual descriptions of objects but also various annotations about the objects, such as metadata for children, course materials prepared by school teachers, classroom reports, etc., and are reusable for search and educational purposes. Owlery is a software platform to create, share, utilize and reuse the Growing Metadata, and in which various metadata and annotations are managed in different levels of authenticity, authorship, and user groups. As a result of the experimental classes for 89 6th-grade children, our framework was found to be efficient and accepted by the content creators, like museum experts, content annotators and shool teachers.