Digital Culture and E‐tourism: Technologies, Applications and Management Approaches

Citation

Isfandyari‐Moghaddam, A. (2012), "Digital Culture and E‐tourism: Technologies, Applications and Management Approaches", Online Information Review, Vol. 36 No. 2, pp. 323-324. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521211240162

Digital technologies are transforming many fields, including culture and tourism. This collection aims to provide leading edge insights into the applications of ICTs in culture and tourism, provide state‐of‐the‐art background for government consultation and advice for academics/practitioners/policy makers and managers in the culture and tourism industries. It includes 14 chapters from more than 30 contributors.

The collection begins with two related chapters on the emergence of digital technologies in the context of museums where original art and artefacts face emerging dynamic and interactive conditions. For instance, the place of Social Network Sites (SNS) in the domain of museums, with a reference to the Panama Viejo Museum, and the utilisation of integrated audiovisual media (e.g. RT3‐DVE or real‐time 3‐D virtual environments) by two recent European cases (i.e. Gardens of Dreaming and RuneCast) are discussed.

Twelve additional chapters cover such issues as service design methods for providing e‐tourism services (Finland); searching, browsing, and visiting cultural objects and sites through the geospatial web (the case of semantic cultural heritage portal CultureSampo in Finland); cultural, innovative and creative tourism; the notion of “web of data” and its place in the tourism industry; the Internet as a powerful communication tool in the tourism industry (a Greek report); Destination Management Systems (DMSs) for developing innovation and synergy through networking, collaboration and cooperation in the tourism industry; the application of a new dynamic and systemic conceptualisation and management of tourism based on complexity theory to gain sustainable competitive advantage; creating, disseminating and exchanging digital heritage content via a new educational framework; interoperability between the fields of cultural production (architecture) and cultural consumption (tourism); the application of advanced technologies like Virtual Reality (VR), web‐based technologies, mobile devices, etc. for the tourism sector; and the application of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and virtual tourism in China.

In addition to a regular table of contents and a full index, there is also a detailed table of contents and a consolidated bibliography, both common features in IGI collections. To assist in understanding, the collection might better have been arranged in three sections: Concepts and Foundations of Digital Culture and E‐Tourism, Case Studies, Future Horizons. This small point aside, I believe this is a book of value to policy makers, managers, academics and students interested in digital culture and e‐tourism.