Introduction
Now, more than ever, cultural environments, in all their forms, can profit from information and communication technologies in order to support their two main aims: content organization and dissemination.

Cultural environments include museums and archaeological sites; festivals and artistic events; government organizations and institutions, etc. All of these environments have to deal with content that is either being gathered and further organized, or disseminated to the public through various mediums. For example, organizing the findings of an archaeological excavation; documenting the books of a library; annotating the exhibitions of a museum; presenting an archaeological site and its findings; creating an educational game based on some cultural artefacts; auctioning modern art products for the economical support of artists, museums and galleries, etc.

All of the above processes may be supported today by information and communication technologies throughout their lifecycle. Firstly, databases and digital libraries may be used for organizing cultural content with the use of protocols and standards. Collection owners, museum curators, librarians and government institutions can use these infrastructures in order to classify and document their information pools. Then, this organized content may be disseminated through the World Wide Web and multimedia applications. Presentation applications that exploit multimedia and Web technologies can be deployed on single computers; on information kiosks; on open areas by using large displays, wireless connections and new interface mediums that exploit motion and position. Trustworthy and secure mechanisms for the distribution of cultural information in heterogeneous computing environments should be deployed along with techniques that permit the provision of guaranteed quality of service to the end-user in cultural information systems. Information retrieval systems are able to draw cultural content from repositories and feed appropriately the above applications. Additionally, educational applications and games may further exploit cultural content. In all of these processes, some special issues regarding content protection and quality transmission and delivery also play an important role.

Conclusively, a variety of information and communication technologies, software applications, hardware systems and supporting infrastructures support several operations of a cultural environment and result in providing rich structuring, retrieving and dissemination capabilities of cultural content, while lessening administrative burdens.

Objective of the Book
The scientific objective of this publication focuses on presenting alternative perspectives of designing, implementing and using digital media in cultural environments. The use and development of digital systems for cultural environments will be discussed in depth. The user needs, the designing of affective and immersive interfaces, the educational applications for exploring museums, the deployment of e-commerce applications for commercial exploiting of cultural heritage and contemporary art, the technologies for developing online cultural presentations and promotional sites, the trust, security and stability issues of media content and computing systems, the quality of service of multimedia networks, the interoperability of systems and the effective resource discovery will be among the issues considered in the proposed edition.

The overall and operational objectives of the publication are as follows: