This proposal requests funds to support an international workshop to explore complex, image rich digital collections and to identify viable alternative approaches to building, managing and providing access to distributed repositories in light of continuing dramatic increases in computational resources available to researchers and organizations. The Workshop organized by the University of Kentucky Computer Science department and the Beazley Archive at Oxford University, UK. The workshop will participants will include prominent computer scientists in imaging and systems areas and cultural heritage experts from a variety of application areas. The workshop is one in a continuing series of interdisciplinary meetings of international researchers aimed at integrating computer vision and digital imaging research products into application domains concerned with digital representations of complex natural artifacts and human works of significant cultural and historic interest. The physical artifacts are held in collections of memory institutions and others distributed around the world and generally inaccessible to researchers and students. Digital fascimilies in networked collections hold the potential for wider access to more objects and altogether new types of analyses.
