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By Concha Fernández de la Puente - October 2000
This section aims to provide news of the European Commission's initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content. Its objectives are to summarise the developments in programmes, projects and activities since the last Cultivate Interactive issue and to give a clear picture of progress in the area. It certainly does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of what the EC is doing in the area but rather a short summary of some of the key items. The content is based largely on the information provided in the e-Culture Newsletter, published by the European Commission, DG Information Society, Cultural Heritage Applications Unit, that can be found on the Web [1].
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Since the last issue of Cultivate Interactive where we informed you about the latest EC's initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content, there have been a number of developments and activities that you might be interested to know about.
The Cultural Heritage Applications unit, that runs RTD and content projects in the area of cultural heritage, has kept quite busy during these weeks. We evaluated the 3rd IST call, that addressed one action line of the 2000 workprogramme:III.1.4: Access to Digital Collections of Cultural and Scientific Content [2]. The area received 51 proposals and has selected 10 projects for funding for a total of 12 M euro. These projects are in negotiation at the moment. The information on them will be published soon on the digicult Web site [3].
The 4th IST call for proposals was opened on 25 July and will close on 31 October 2000. For the cultural heritage area [4] the action lines are III.1.5 Trials on new access modes to cultural and scientific content and III.1.6 Virtual representations of cultural and scientific objects.
The Commission is working now in the drafting of the IST workprogramme 2001 (WP2001) with the assistance of the IST Advisory Group (ISTAG). The role of ISTAG is to provide the Commission with independent advice concerning the content and direction of research work to be carried out under the IST Programme. ISTAG has been working on the report Recommendations of the IST Advisory Group for Workprogramme 2001 and beyond: "Implementing the vision" [5]. As for the digital heritage and cultural content area, the envisaged action lines in WP2001 are:
· Advanced digital library applications: where the focus will be visual aspects and integrating emerging new visualisation techniques into new digital library models
· Heritage for all: activities will focus on a more local or regional approach towards what is called the living record of society and the way people create and interact with their own digital culture.
A Cultural Heritage project's concertation event [6] was organised with the collaboration of the Cultural Service Centre of Austria in Vienna on 30 June 2000. This event was an opportunity for project participants to gather together and discuss current issues related to the IT research within the cultural sector.
The IST2000 Conference [7] programme is now fixed. This conference will take place in Nice from 6 to 8 December. The Cultural Heritage Applications unit is organising a session on Games and online communities that will consist of a panel discussion moderated by Marc Cavazza (University of Teeside, UK). Participants will be Nicolas Gaume (Kalisto Entertainment, France), Ryohei Nakatsu (ATR Media Integration & Communications Research Laboratories, Japan), Tony Mott (Edge Magazine, UK) and James Doornbos (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, Spain). Drawing from the fields of portal builders, virtual world creators and experts in online gaming and knowledge management, the session will examine the technical, aesthetic and social requirements for creating successful online gaming communities.
Following a call for tender [8] a study on "Technological landscapes for tomorrow's cultural economy" will be launched in short. The study will research the state of the art and future trends in the use and development of information and communication technologies for and within the cultural sector.
After 3 calls evaluated and more than 30 projects on-going or in negotiation, one of the strong clusters that unexpectedly have emerged is film heritage. Projects in this cluster are working in applying new technologies in support of access to and preservation of the European film heritage. In this sense we are also following and participating in some of the DG Education and Culture activities on cinematographic heritage. The other clusters identified are: digital libraries, cross-domains issues and knowledge distribution change.
Finally, just to mention eEurope developments in relation to our work, we have identified 17 of our new projects as contributing to eEurope objectives. This will give us courage to keep working in the same line.
Moving to activities carried out by another Commission's departments, it has been announced that Croatia is now eligible to participate in the Fifth Framework Programme for RTD, on a project by project basis, with own, not EC funds. Malta and Switzerland can participate on EC funds from January 2001, including Call 4, subject to signature of final agreements.
Women are currently under-represented in the field of scientific research. The Commission, aware of this problem, has set up a working group on "Women and science" [9] to co-ordinate action to promote women in European research. However, to achieve this, efforts will have to be made at European and Member State level. Accordingly, the Commission will encourage discussion and the sharing of experience among the Member States.
As we have already informed you, the TEN-Telecom programme [10] promotes the deployment of trans-European telecommunications services and applications in areas of common interest, by providing an aid on business plan preparation or on the initial investment phases. TEN-Telecom is now planning to open a new call for proposals [11] at the end of October that will include actions in the cultural heritage area. The objective is to create the conditions for the deployment of multimedia applications giving access to the European cultural heritage (collections and materials held in libraries, museums and audio-visual archives) and developing models allowing a fair return on investment. An Information Day [12] will be held in Brussels on 14 November.
The international conference "Managing the Digital Future of Libraries" [13] Moscow 19-20 April 2000 marked the final phase of the EU-Tacis project on the Russian State Library. One of the outcomes was the Moscow Manifesto: Russian Libraries, Museums and Archives of the Third Millenium and their role in the Global Information Society and Knowledge Society. The manifesto makes recommendations on ways in which support and cooperation can strengthen the development of digital heritage in Russia.
In this overview we have reviewed again the key EC initiatives addressing the cultural heritage area in a digital environment, focussing in the work carried out by the cultural heritage area of IST. In general, what is emerging as a focus for our future work is to help create a European cultural information landscape by encouraging cultural memory organisations to participate in R&D actions providing innovative prototype networked services for both professional users and citizens. This future information landscape should be easy to identify, easy to access, and easy to navigate and should be extended to also encompass Europe's scientific and industrial heritage.
We intend to keep you informed of new developments as they occur.
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Concha Fernández de la Puente
European Commission
DG Information Society
Cultural Heritage Applications
concha.fpuente@cec.eu.int
<http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/>
The information provided does not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Commission.
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For citation purposes:
Fernández de la Puente, C. "DIGICULT Column", Cultivate Interactive, issue
2, 16 October 2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue2/digicult/>
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