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By Bruce Royan - July 2000
Bruce Royan describes one possible model for Cultivate. The Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network was set up by museums, libraries and archives to create multimedia, manage digital IPR and provide educational access. SCRAN enforces standards for preservation and interoperability, and its licensing-based business model indicates it can be sustainable into the future.
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The success of the European Cultural Heritage Network will depend in part on the development of organizations able to bring together resources from a range of memory institutions and a variety of curatorial traditions in order to create holistic educational content, and then deliver such content seamlessly and consistently to the citizen at a public access terminal. One such organization is called SCRAN [1]
SCRAN, the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network, is a Millennium project, with an initial spend of £15 million Sterling to build a networked multimedia resource base for the study and celebration of human history and material culture in Scotland. Although based on the libraries, archives, museums and built heritage of Scotland, SCRAN's prime concern is not with conservation, nor with documentation, but with educational access.
SCRAN was set up as an independent, not-for-profit, limited company to manage the digital intellectual property rights of its members [2]. In effect, SCRAN offers grant aid for the digitization of cultural treasures, in exchange for a non-exclusive licence for their educational use. Contributing institutions gain a new digital asset, which they can exploit commercially if they wish, while librarians, teachers and students at institutions in membership of SCRAN can download images, movies and sound clips, copyright cleared and ready to use.
All resources are digitised at a very high resolution (not less than 3072 x 2048)(Fig 1)
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| Figure 1: Extract from an Archive-quality SCRAN Image |
From this archival resource, a network surrogate is created at a lower resolution (currently 768 pixels on its longest axis), to minimise download time. This networked resource may only be downloaded by members of a bona fide educational institution (public library, school, college etc) licensed by SCRAN. It is protected by an invisible "watermark" (to confirm the resource’s Copyright status) and "fingerprint" (to identify who downloaded it and when). To avoid any accusations of "entrapment", this information is also clearly shown in banners at the top and bottom of the downloaded image (Fig 2).
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| Figure 2: Downloaded Educational-quality SCRAN Image |
But any member of the public, anywhere in the world, has access to a thumbnail image of the asset, (150 pixels on its longest axis) plus full textual documentation. This documentation contains descriptive and access information, extracted from conventional library catalogues and museum collection management systems, and normalized to be compliant with the Dublin Core set of metadata elements [3]. It is supplemented by explanatory caption material specifically written to a set of educational guidelines, worded to be understandable by the intelligent lay reader, and to build into a vast online encyclopedia (Fig 3).
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| Figure 3: SCRAN record Available freely on the Web |
The SCRAN resources available online in this way are being developed as a collection of discrete assets; each of them should be self-explanatory, and any of them may be linked together for a particular educational purpose, and used time and again. Some of these articulations have resulted in CD-ROM publications, which are distributed at cost to licensee institutions as well as being sold commercially [4]. Others are available on the website as value-added services for licenced users: an example of this is the range of Pathfinders, brief illustrated guides to key people, places, events and things that may be found on the resource base (Fig 4)
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| Figure 4: Extract from a SCRAN Pathfinder |
The SCRAN resource base [5] already gives access to 400,000 records from memory institutions nationwide: from Shetland to Galloway and from Fair Isle to Dunbar. Over 72,000 of these records include multimedia: images, sound and film clips and virtual reality, contributing to a rich picture of the cultural heritage of Scotland. By August 2001 at the end of its initial grant period, these totals will have risen to 1 Million and 120,000 respectively. There would be little point, however in creating such a vast digital resource base, if it were to cease to be available online once the grant had been spent, and so SCRAN has from its beginning been working to a Business Plan which provides SCRAN with a sustainable future [6]
This plan relies on SCRAN being able to obtain substantial revenue streams from licence sales to educational institutions. SCRAN strongly supports the principle that educational resources should be made available free at the point of use, but just as libraries are accustomed to purchase books so that their students can read them for free, we believe that educational institutions will pay a reasonable price for their students to access SCRAN. So far, the signs are that such a sustainability model will be achievable. Some 2,000 educational institutions including schools, colleges, universities, museums and public libraries have bought SCRAN licences and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee has recently announced its intention to purchase SCRAN access for every Higher and Further Education Institution in the United Kingdom. It is beginning to look as if, in Scotland at least, there is a future for The Past.
(6 June 2000)
(6 June 2000)
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Professor Bruce Royan
Chief Executive
SCRAN
Abden House
1 Marchhall Crescent
EDINBURGH
EH16 5HW
Scotland
United Kingdom
bruce@scran.ac.uk
<http://www.scran.ac.uk>
Phone: +44 131 662 1211
Fax: +44 131 662 1511
Bruce Royan has over 30 years experience in the field of electronic cultural and information services, working with British Telecom, the London Borough of Camden, The British Library and the National Library of Scotland, before implementing the Singapore Integrated Library Automation Service (SILAS) in the mid-80s. He returned to the UK as Principal Information Systems Consultant with Infologistix Ltd, consulting and lecturing worldwide. After 7 years as University Librarian and Director of Information Services at the University of Stirling, he is now the Chief Executive of SCRAN.
Bruce serves on the Library and Information Advisory Committee of the British Council, and the Digitisation Advisory Panel of the UK New Opportunities Fund. He is also Visiting Professor of Publishing and Communication at Napier University.
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For citation purposes:
Royan, B "Scotland in Europe: SCRAN as a Maquette for the European Cultural Heritage Network",
Cultivate Interactive, issue 1, 3 July 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue1/scran/>
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