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By Makx Dekkers - January 2001
Makx Dekkers of PricewaterhouseCoopers describes some recent developments in the area of application profiles and how application profiles are being used, based on experiences in the SCHEMAS project.
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If you want to define a metadata schema for your electronic resources, you may want to base your work on what others have done. Until some time ago, everybody who needed to define a metadata element set (or schema) to be used for a particular project or collection of resources, invented their own solution. It is becoming apparent that this approach, re-inventing the wheel so to speak, is not the optimal way of working.
It is now becoming accepted that it is a good starting point to base the definition of a local schema on work that other people have done. To support this, the SCHEMAS project [1] aims to build an information service where schemas developed in many places around the world can be found. For a start, this information service will begin to solve one of the major problems encountered by metadata schema designers: the difficulty to find out what has happened elsewhere.
However, finding out about existing schemas is only a first step towards the ultimate goal: harmonising usage and converging on formal or de-facto standards. As has been identified by the SCHEMAS project from its inception, any particular project or product has specific requirements that cannot be fully met by standards "straight from the box". Almost all practical implementations will have to mix and match elements from various schemas and have a potential need to define additional elements of their own. This mechanism of mixing and matching and defining private elements results in what is now called an application profile.
The concept of application profiles has emerged in discussions on metadata schemas in the last year, in relation to work that is being done on metadata registries, specifically in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative [2]. The partners in the SCHEMAS project, and specifically Thomas Baker of GMD and Rachel Heery and Manjula Patel of UKOLN, have made major contributions to this discussion.
Baker, in a “strawman proposal” to the Dublin Core Registry working group [3] defines application profiles as entities that declare which elements from which namespaces underlie the local schema used in a particular application or project. In his view, application profiles “re-use” semantics from namespaces and repackage them for a particular purpose. This is in line with Heery and Patel [4] who define application profiles as schemas consisting of elements drawn from one or more namespaces, combined together and optimised for a particular application. They suggest that a distinction can be made between a namespace schema (containing all those elements defined for a particular namespace) and an application profile schema (containing combinations of sub-sets of one or more namespace schemas).
It needs to be pointed out that the term namespace in these definitions should be read as the metadata element definitions and semantics defined within those namespaces. As an example, the namespace for the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, version 1.1 [5] can be referred to (in XML) as:
xmlns:dc= "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
At the location specified by the URL, the 15 Dublin Core elements and their semantics are defined.
The SCHEMAS project adopted the following definition at the occasion of the second workshop [6]:
| Implementation projects generally find that no one metadata standard will completely meet their descriptive needs. General standards such as Dublin Core must often be used alongside domain- or sector-specific standards such as MPEG-7 for multimedia and IEEE/LOM for educational resources; and new elements may be needed for local needs not covered by any of the existing standards. Recent practice distinguishes between the definition of semantics in "namespaces" (i.e. official standards) and the reuse and interpretation of those semantics in "application profiles". Application profiles are schemas that combine elements from multiple standards, perhaps with application-specific constraints such as the use of specific controlled vocabulary. |
In his “strawman proposal” and in subsequent discussions, Baker laid out a number of functional requirements for application profiles.
These requirements fall into four categories:
It needs to be noted that this is very much ‘work in progress’ and that these requirements may evolve over time, before there is a general agreement.
The concept of application profiles is rather new. What is not new is that many activities and projects have been mixing and matching metadata elements sets, and have added elements to existing sets and modified the semantics of existing elements (in the sense of defining them in the context of specific applications).
The Third SCHEMAS Metadata Watch Report [7] lists a number of examples:
During the second SCHEMAS Workshop, a number of activities presented their approach towards application profiles:
From the presentations at the SCHEMAS workshop, it became clear that many metadata schema designers go through more or less the same process in designing their metadata schema. The following steps can be identified:
In fact, what results from this process is the creation of an application profile for the local implementation, re-using elements from existing sets and adding private elements where no equivalents can be found in existing sets.
In the process described above, crucial steps are 1 and 2. In practice, they are not always taken in this order, as sometimes it can be a strategic objective to adhere to a metadata standard that is dominant in the particular application domain. This happens for example when educational projects want to use the IEEE LTSC LOM standard, or when organisations involved in geographical information consider it important to adhere to the FGDC standard.
Also, for the selection of a standard set it is important that an appropriate standard is available. In the examples above, well-known standard sets are available. If more than one standard exists for a particular domain, e.g. DCMI Education, IMS and LOM, the groups that develop the standards are often co-operating and harmonising the standards. It is not surprising that in sectors where standardisation of metadata element sets is not well advanced or where there is little co-ordination between standardisation activities (such as the industry, publishing and audiovisual sectors) the use or even awareness of application profiles is low.
Looking at the list of functional requirements formulated by Baker, it can be seen that these cover a number of the questions for which implementers may be looking for answers. The work on application profiles is, however, in its early stages. A number of fundamental questions have only begun to be asked and answers need to be found through further research and experimentation.
Much is dependent on the emergence of registries where application profiles can be published and found by others. Work in the area of registries is underway in various places, such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, the Indecs project, XML.org, and, indeed, the SCHEMAS project itself.
Based on the experiences gained in these various activities, conclusions can be reached on how application profiles can help implementers to make the best use of experiences from other activities, thereby reducing the resources in the design and implementation phase, as well as helping further harmonisation to take place.
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Makx Dekkers
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Luxembourg
Project Co-ordinator SCHEMAS
Makx Dekkers is a manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, based in Luxembourg. He has a background in library automation and information networking, specialising in metadata issues. He was responsible for a series of metadata workshops in Luxemburg between 1997 and 1999, and is a member of the Dublin Core Advisory Committee. He is currently the project coordinator of the SCHEMAS project.
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For citation purposes:
Dekkers, M. "Application Profiles, or how to Mix and Match Metadata Schemas", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/schemas/>
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By Carlos Wert and Francisca Hernández - January 2001
COVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archive in XML) [1] is an IST funded program, launched as part of the IST first call, corresponding to key action 3 (Multimedia content and tools: cultural heritage and digital content) in the action line III.2.3 (Access to scientific and cultural heritage).
The main purpose of COVAX is to test the use of XML to combine document descriptions and digitised surrogates of cultural documents to build a global system for search and retrieval, increasing accessibility via the Internet to electronic resources, regardless of their location.
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COVAX objectives are :
COVAX's approach to reach these objectives is based on the conversion of existing records into homogeneously-encoded document descriptions of bibliographic records, archive finding aids, museum records and catalogues, and electronic texts and on the application of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and the various Document Type Descriptions (DTD) currently being used for library materials descriptions (MARC DTD), archives finding aids (EAD), museum materials (AMICO DTD) and electronic versions of cultural texts (TEIlite).
COVAX is designed to form a network of XML repositories as a distributed database to be accessed as a single one and will act as a meta-search engine, offering access to book references, finding aids, facsimile images, museum items, etc.. COVAX is constructing a multilingual user interface to access such data and will deal with different kinds of data (catalogue records, finding aids…) and with different kinds of materials (manuscripts, prints, graphic materials, digital images, electronic texts…)
The project does not intend to create standards but to lie on the adoption of existing standards and concepts (XML, DTDs already in use, http…), using Z39.50 protocol as a conceptual basis for communication between multilingual user interface and meta-search engine and Dublin Core Metadata Element Set elements as cross domain access points.
The project duration is 24 months, it started in January 2000 and the partners includes content owners (Memory institutions) and technological partners (developers: public RTD centres and private companies). The Project Co-ordinator is Residencia de Estudiantes (Spain) and the partners Angewandte InformationsTechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH. and Salzburg Research (Austria), Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden), Software AG España, S.A., Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and Biblioteca de Menéndez Pelayo (Spain), LASER (London and South Eastern Library Region, UK), and ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technology, Energy and the Environment, Italy)
The first months of the project were devoted to the design of the system, the conversion of existing records, and the software development for version 1 of COVAX prototype. The first design tasks were to define a coherent sample of records and documents from content owners partners, to analyse existing DTDs and select the appropriate ones, and to propose a common information structure.
A comprehensive set of documents for the prototype were selected containing a wide variety of documents, descriptions, formats and databases: standard and non standard bibliographic records (including five different MARC formats), four different structures for archive and museum finding aids and information in six different languages (Catalan, Italian, English, German, Spanish, Swedish).
COVAX is intended to satisfy needs of general public as well as professional users. User requirements are basically structured around these criteria:
In the system definition, a crucial point was the selection of the DTDs to be used to convert in XML documents bibliographic, archival and museum data existing in content providers original databases. The decision was made on the basis of the State of the Art studies developed in the early stages of the project, that included a view on XML standards, projects, software, etc. From the beginning, the possibility of creating specific DTDs for COVAX was rejected, and the DTDs created by institutions with important standardisation capabilities were adopted (the above mentioned MARC DTD, EAD, AMICO DTD and TEIlite). COVAX team has assumed that the influence, or even visibility of the project, was strongly related with the relevance of the standards adopted. The use of DTDs maintained by standardisation bodies permits also the use of a set of tools and procedures that will facilitate the adoption of XML by little or mid-size Memory Institutions that doesn’t have so much specialised personnel or resources. All mentioned DTDs has been adapted to be converted from SGML to XML DTDs.
Once data structures to be used were defined, the partners began the conversion from original records, although there are differences among types of descriptions. Archival finding aids, museum descriptions and a part of the electronic texts included in the prototype were created directly in EAD, AMICO or TEIlite. The major conversion problem lies in the conversion of bibliographic records that present up to five different MARC formats (IBERMARC, UNIMARC, UKMARC, CATMARC, LIBRIS-MARC). It’s been necessary to plan different conversion processes: from original formats to MARC 21 (the basis of MARC DTD) using tools owned by the partners or by means of USEMARCON. In other cases, conversions were made directly, producing the adequate code, from original data structures to MARC DTD. For records converted to USMARC, a free software provided by the Library of Congress, MARCONV, will be used to transform them to MARC DTD.
A second main issue was to establish access points to records contained in COVAX databases. It was necessary to define common access points for archival, librarian and museum descriptions, in order to make available information search and retrieval through the pertinent elements of each DTD in use. The elements defined in Dublin Core Metadata Element Set provided a solution for this problem. Initially, Dublin Core metadata were defined for the description of electronic resources on the Internet, and resulted in a simple and general way to do such description. These features were suitable for any kind of description and make Dublin Core 15 basic elements very useful when intended to retrieve information from heterogeneous descriptions, as it occurs with those based on DTDs mentioned above. Consequently, the team has made the equivalence between COVAX DTDs elements and Dublin Core ones. Another advantage of Dublin Core is that it has already incorporated BIB-1 attribute list and then it is compliant with a Z39.50 model.
The use of Z39.50 protocol for search and retrievalhis is one of COVAX design main features. From the early stages of system definition, the implementation of Z39.50 model (protocol for searches in distributed databases) was considered of crucial importance. This feature may strengthened the project and contribute to assure the future application of its results. To achieve this, COVAX will use XML Encoding Rules, created as a mechanism for the inter-operability between Z39.50 systems and Web/Internet systems. In fact, the process initiated by the project will permit to incorporate COVAX to Z39.50 universe, once W3C publishes the requirements to make XML queries using Z39.50 model.
COVAX partners have established two different database models: native XML databases and access to existing non-XML repositories to retrieve information from the original database and transform it on XML documents in the moment of presenting it to users.
In the preceding paragraphs we have presented the current situation of the project. To summarise, COVAX is not only incorporating XML as a basic standard but also integrating other standards, adapting them to XML. But XML world is rapidly evolving and some changes and/or new features can be incorporated as COVAX progresses. That supposes the need of an important concertation activity with similar projects. Other strategic question for the future of the project is to take into account exploitation issues.
COVAX will test the advantages of XML as a way to encode and process cultural heritage information, explore the feasibility of converting existing cultural heritage descriptions into XML encoded information, adapt cultural information systems to user requirements and contribute to the extension of some standards for presentation and dissemination of cultural heritage.
Ultimately, it will enhance access to cultural heritage (one of Europe’s most important competitive advantages) for all citizens. All those aspects reflect the interests of COVAX partners that we think are shared by most of European Memory Institutions and by the European Commission.
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Carlos Wert and Francisca Hernández
Residencia de Estudiantes.
Pinar, 23
28006. Madrid, Spain.
ile@interlink.es
URL: <http://www.covax.org/>
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For citation purposes:
Wert, C and Hernández, F. "COVAX Project ", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/covax/>
By Francesca Tinelli - January 2001
How about experiencing the social life of ancient times, learning about history, but having the same amount of fun as playing a “state of the art” video game? Francesca Tinelli introduces the RENAISSANCE Project.
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Virtual Renaissance Court [1] is a research and development project funded by the European Commission as part of the framework of the IST programme. Successfully selected during the first call of the programme in 1999, the project officially started on the 1st of January 2000. The project is being directed by Italian electronic publisher Giunti Multimedia, and involves the German virtual community specialists, Blaxxun Interactive, the Swedish game publishers, Iridon Interactive, and the Italian research institute Istituto Trentino di Cultura (ITC-IRST).
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| Figure 1: The Palazzo Ducale of Urbino |
The aim of the Renaissance project is to develop a new genre of edutainment applications featuring a high quality graphical interface, networked co-operative environments, scientifically validated contents and an innovative pedagogical approach. This enables the reproduction of historically fascinating environments while using the appealing interface of a game in order to teach history.
The project foresees the development of a prototype reproducing life in a Renaissance court, a 3D multi player Internet application where the users can play the role of different courtiers at the same court.
They will be free to fight or ally with each other, but the social outcome of their actions, and their corresponding position in the virtual community, will be checked against historical correctness. Life in a Renaissance court was subject to complex and subtle behaviour rules. A good courtier was expected to have very good diplomatic and military abilities, but also a high cultural level and behave well in order to win the Prince's favour. He had to face many difficulties and enemies to increase his social position. The aim of the game is to accurately reproduce fascinating historic scenarios through a scientifically validated reconstruction. The player has to learn the customs and habits of the time period whilst experimenting with the subtleties a courtier had to master to escape his opponents’ traps and to gain reputation and power in the court.
The game aims to engage interactivity, offering to the user 3D real time action-adventure and a challenging range of puzzles and problems while teaching about daily life during the Renaissance. Possible actions and choices will be based on the cultural parameters of the simulated age. Very simple and clear interfaces will promote decision making and involvement, while a range of characters to interact with and to speak to will allow users to become a part of the historical action. Non-playing characters can assign missions to the avatars: these missions will allow the players to gain points, as well as to learn the different aspects of Renaissance.
The interface will be a 3D reconstructed ancient environment, accurately reproducing the appeal of original historical settings, palaces, costumes and characters. The game will also be a portal to an Internet community. An Internet server will manage the community interactions, tracing users behaviours and allowing information and chats to be exchanged. On the server an intelligent evaluation agent will reside that, processing data according to a scientific “Knowledge Base”, will assess and evaluate users' role-playing, defining the consequences of their actions in the social structure of the reconstructed community.
The project is currently at the end of its pre-production and system definition phase. This phase was devoted to collecting and defining the users and then the system requirements. Requirements for the community server and the game engine have been derived and the system architecture defined. History and pedagogical experts have identified the necessities for a realistic and effective historical reconstruction and defined the final system concept. Sources for multimedia assets and for Renaissance life-style rules have been identified as well. The work generated by this task took advantage of the involvement of experts and authors currently working with the Giunti publishing house.
Now the project is entering its production and system implementation phase, consisting of the real system construction. The community server, with its administration tools and historical behaviour Evaluation Engine will be implemented; at present the Evaluation Engine prototype development is almost complete. The 3D game client will be developed and the multimedia assets produced. Then the complete system will be integrated and functionally tested.
As an end product, VRC (Virtual Renaissance Court) will be of great use to the educational sector as a way of creating student interest in history and social affairs. Whole classes of students could feasibly each have their own online character, guiding them through a rich and accurate historical environment whilst learning valuable lessons about the past.
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| Figure 2: The Duchess of Urbino |
History experts worked on a summation of all relevant Renaissance knowledge in order to correctly define the Renaissance life-style. The work also included a physical description of the geographic environment, architecture, dress, common objects, and all written and non-written rules relevant to evaluate user behaviour in the virtual society. All this relevant information is being transposed into the software in the form of accurate character behaviour, habits, and social hierarchy rules. In this way the system will be able to assess the actions of the players against historical knowledge of the time, and will be able to identify possible consequences for different behaviours.
A “situational” study of the people and events of this particular period provides insight to help players better develop their own definitions and answers, using historical evidence to support their ideas. This approach provides a straightforward way to use the learning environment to build users’ mastery of the historical content and processes depicted in the simulation. A wide variety of situations allow users to choose actions which will suit different types of behaviour. Players are encouraged to develop judgement and to examine their values and the values of other players whilst facing a series of situations designed to get them choosing between a set of possible actions. They can complete the activities related to the simulation, using them to organise their own experience and comprehension of events. Therefore users can make decisions, examine their values, and re-experience the passion of events that formed History.
The development of artificial intelligence for the Renaissance project is being taken to extraordinary depths to ensure accuracy and create a believable world for players to roam freely within. From a technical point of view, the Renaissance project has a two-fold objective: to derive a self-consistent pilot application (Game) as well as a development environment (Author tool).
As regards the Game side, an Internet server will manage the community interactions, tracing users’ characteristics and behaviours and allowing information and chat to be exchanged. An intelligent Evaluation Engine will reside on the server, founding its decisions on a scientific “Knowledge Base” of Renaissance living habits, it will compare and evaluate users’ actions. The server administration will guarantee that a basic Court structure is always running, in order to avoid the absence of certain users which could be potentially crucial to play. Except for when in tutorial mode, the game will be functional only when connected to the server. After a basic personalisation of their character, the user will go online and enter the Court as a foreigner. From then on it will be their ability in learning Renaissance life style that will drive them to success.
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| Figure 3: Federigo da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino |
As regards the Author tool side, the project will offer a number of advanced key components, including a state-of-the-art 3D engine and an unrivalled artificial intelligence component. The AI component will be able to simulate broad social parameters from any period in history or fictitious universe, forming a “software kit” that offers a complete online world-authoring environment. The suite of tools, composed of state of the art market tools and “ad hoc” developed ones, will be characterised by a set of modules fully interoperating and yet fully replaceable by any other module covering the same function and respecting the proper interfacing rules. The various tools within the package will also be available separately, which allows a variety of developers to create state of the art web sites, applications, games, and educational software. The “software kit” includes four major components:
In Renaissance, the community of players will act as a learning group while an intelligent agent and server administrator will be remote teachers. The Internet server will manage the community interactions, tracing users characteristics and behaviour, and allowing peer-to-peer conversations. An intelligent evaluation agent will reside on the server side and, processing data according to the scientific “Knowledge Base”, will assess and evaluate the users' role-playing skills, defining the consequences of their actions in the social structure of the reconstructed community. The Evaluation Engine will assess users' actions, checking them against historic correctness. The intelligent agent, on the basis of the knowledge domain provided by Renaissance experts, will be able to automatically evaluate players behaviour, deciding the consequences of their actions.
Particular attention will be given to the validation phase, whose results could open new future perspectives for the project outcomes. The evaluation essentially will be carried out in two directions: on one side historians and Renaissance experts will validate the scientific nature of the contents, on the other side the system didactic value and effectiveness will be tested with a critical mass of users.
The potential market area is extensive: from young people - the same market sector as video game consumers - to libraries, from families, to primary and secondary schools. In fact, even if "edutainment" is one of the current buss words dealing with multimedia publishing, a real edutainment products (applying to people older than 6-8 years) is not readily available on the market: multimedia titles are amusing OR didactic.
“We felt that there was a strong demand for believable, fully immersed online historical recreations. Games like VRC will not only provide endless hours of play, but also a chance for users to get a real sense of what actually being there was like. As such it will provide an incredibly powerful educational tool”, said David Fuschi, Project Manager at Giunti Multimedia. Marco Caprelli, Games Director of Giunti Multimedia's development studio continued “Also, for the first time, programmers will be able to create realistic environments and characters that react in a true to life way. We can see it drawing in players and users from all ages and walks of life who are eager to have an alternate lifestyle that they can escape into.”
Virtual Renaissance Court will be ready for play in the summer of 2001, with the authoring environment and its components scheduled to be available to publishers and developers by 2002.
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Francesca Tinelli
GIUNTI MULTIMEDIA
Research & Development Dpt.
Ripa di Porta Ticinese, 91
20143 Milan - Italy
Phone : +39 2 83 93 374 / 408
Francesca Tinelli joined the Research & Development Dept. Of Giunti Multimedia in 1997. She has participated in several other research projects, particularly managing the development of pilot applications and monitoring demonstration/evaluation activities by end-users. Her research interests include ergonomic graphic interfaces for pedagogical and edutainment applications .
Giunti Multimedia srl is the digital publishing arm of the Giunti Publishing Group, and is recognized as the Italian leader in the primary and secondary educational publishing sector. Giunti presently accounts for more than 180 million Euros consolidated turnover with shares in 25 Companies covering all publishing issues, from conception to printing and distribution.
Blaxxun Interactive AG is an international company with offices in Munich and San Francisco, and is the world leader in technologies for virtual worlds. Blaxxun provides products and complete solutions for the commerce, community and collaboration markets.
Iridon Interactive AB is a developer and publisher of interactive entertainment products for the PC. We create, direct, and produce computer and video games based on original properties.
Istituto Trentino di Cultura is focused on scientific excellence, innovation, and technology transfer to enterprises and public services. In its areas of competence, ITC collaborates with the main actors in worldwide research and it works in synchrony with the European Union Programs. Research activities are carried out in scientific and technological areas, advanced computer science, microelectronics, physics, mathematical sciences, and in human sciences.
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For citation purposes:
Tinelli, F. "The RENAISSANCE Project: a Virtual Journey in a Renaissance Court", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/renaissance/>
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By René van Horik - January 2001
René van Horik reports on the European Visual Archive Project (EVA), which reviews the obstacles and alternatives in providing access to the photographic collections of public archives. EVA aims to create a working information system for end users allowing them to discover the rich photographic resources of public archives.
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"Historical photograph collections are among the least accessible sources available to researchers because of their large size, complex organisation, physical fragility, and often-rudimentary description and cataloguing. Most consist of large groups of related materials that share one or more significant common denominators, such as source, subject, or medium. That common feature often serves as the framework for organizing and providing access to the individual pieces" [1].
This citation from Stephen Ostrow's report Digitizing Historical Pictorial Collections for the Internet describes in general the starting point of the EVA project. The project aims to investigate relevant issues to enhancing access to historical photographic collections. These issues include: copyright issues, selection procedures, user surveys, digitization techniques, description standards, pricing policy and digital information management systems. Based on the outcomes of this research a Web-based information system is being developed: the EVA system. This system contains descriptions and digital images that belong to the photographic holdings of two City archives: the London Metropolitan Archives and the City archives of Antwerp.
The EVA project has two main audiences: Image producers and image consumers. Based on the outcomes of the project an archive will be able to digitize and document its photographs in a well thought-out way. The low threshold for collections to join the EVA system provides them with a tool to get in contact with a huge potential of image consumers [2]. These users can search the image descriptions, view reference images and order images for specific use.
The purpose of this article is to report on the main outcomes of the studies carried out within the framework of the project and to describe the starting points on which the EVA system is based.
EVA is part of the INFO2000 initiative launched by the European Commission. INFO2000 projects are multi-national, public-private sector partnerships that exploit public sector information. Both end-users and information-holders throughout the member states of the European Union should benefit from the project results. The project started in December 1998 and ended in February 2001. After completion of the EVA project, the EVA system will be further expanded and developed [3].
The project follows a more or less natural path that starts with an inventory of relevant issues regarding the exploitation of historical photographs and leads to an information system that best meets the requirements of the content providers and the collection users [4].
The project started with an analysis of historical photographic collections and a survey among users. It became clear that users are especially interested in historical photographs of the built environment. This played a role in the selection of the images to be presented in the information system that was developed further on in the project. One of the project partners, the European Commission on Preservation and Access, extended the research on a broad international scale and published the results in the printed and online publication In the Picture [5]. The study made clear that many different institutions hold photographic collections that can be considered as an essential part of European cultural heritage. For only a small minority of the institutions commercial exploitation of the collection is an important activity. The total number of photographs held is huge and displays a wide range of materials. Preservation of the collection is often problematic [6]. Almost all institutions in the survey have started digitization projects. Concerning digitization techniques and documentation schemes an enormous diversity can be observed. Often the short-term view prevails over a long-term vision. The outcomes of the study revealed the relevance for common standards and guidelines in the field of digitization and documentation.
Early on in the project the copyright was studied in European context in order to avoid legal problems once the photographs were available online. A report of the EVA project showed the differences between the copyright in Belgium, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands [7]. A harmonization under the new EU copyright directive is not realised yet. Concerning the selection of photographs for online access, the content providers followed their national copyright laws.
The quality and standards research of the project took a closer look into alternatives to digitize and describe historical photographs. Several good guidelines are available to base a digitization and documentation project on. But the ultimate standard does not exist, because several factors should be taken into consideration. After the discussion of the outcomes of the preparatory studies the EVA project team reached the following conclusions:
The initial project studies served as the basis for the digitization of the collection and the development of a working model, the EVA system. Both are described later on in more in detail.
In this section the background on the creation of digital images and descriptions for the EVA system is described.
Based on the results of the preparatory studies the content providers of the project, the City archives of Antwerp and London Metropolitan Archives, each started the process of selecting photographs by creating 10.000 digital master files [8]. These digital images had to be “rich” enough to serve as the basis for derivative images that are published online in the EVA system. The specifications for these online images are given in table 1. Next to that the digital master files will be used for other types of output, such as the creation of high quality prints. A labor-intensive re-scan of the vulnerable originals should be prevented. The two archives did not start from scratch. They both already had experiences with digitizing photographs, so several images could be “re-cycled” for the project.
The online access system to be developed in the project should contain small thumbnail images for a fast global reference to the original. Next to that a reference image should reveal the complete essence of the original photograph to the user. It took some discussion before agreement on the specification of the reference image was reached, because an image with too many picture elements could lead to an unintended use of the images. The reference image should give a fair impression of the details of the original photographs on a standard computer screen (800 x 600 pixels) but should not facilitate the creation of a high quality print on paper.
| Image type | Thumbnail | Reference |
| Purpose | Global reference | Fair impression of the original on a standard computer screen (800 x 600 pixels) |
| Pixel dimension | 50 pixels in longest dimension | 400 pixels in the longest dimension |
| Image dynamics | 256 gray levels | 256 gray levels |
| Image file format | Jpeg | Jpeg |
| Remarks | Visual watermark contains copyright statement at the bottom of the image |
Table 1: specifications of derivative images that are available in the online access system (EVA system)
 |
| Image 1: An example of a reference
image from the EVA system: 400 pixels in the longest dimension, 256 gray levels, jpeg image file format, visual copyright statement at the bottom of the image. |
 |
| Scheme 1: Illustration of digital
image production principle of the EVA system Archives create digital master files from which derivatives are subtracted. These are sent by the standard Internet protocol FTP to the server of the EVA-system. Archives can add, delete and replace images independently. |
Digitizing historical photographs is more than just putting photographic prints on a scanner. A lot of information associated with the creation of digital images is relevant for (future) use, access, update and maintenance of the images and the relation with the original prints. This information (or data) about data is called metadata. It turned out to be that within the “universe of discourse” of the EVA project several metadata schemes are of potential importance. This is because roughly speaking the EVA project is covers three related “things”: firstly, the historical photograph as a physical medium, secondly, the digital surrogate that is based on the photograph and thirdly, that what is visible on the photograph and the processed digital image. For the sake of abstraction these three “things” together (the photograph format, the digital image and the visible scene or content) are called an “EVA visual object”, abbreviated as EVO. It was the initial ambition of the project to develop a description scheme that covers all aspects of an EVO. The elements for this scheme are taken from several relevant professional communities. The archival community developed a standard on the description of archival holdings. From the digital imaging world initiatives resulted in important technical descriptive data elements for digital still images. Concerning the content of the visual sources museum and library organisations have produced metadata schemes that are relevant. Finally research into the history of photography resulted in interesting documentation protocols. The project reviewed several description schemes but concluded that more research and consultation with domain specialists is required to establish a complete and full EVO-metadata scheme. The project designed a provisional, simple and small description object: the EVOlite. More information on the EVOlite is given below.
The project concentrated its further description activities on a specific type of application: the minimal description elements that are required to set up the Web based information system that should give access to the digital images. The “Dublin Core Metadata Element Set”, a draft ANSI standard, served as the basis for the development of this minimal set of descriptive elements [9]. The 15 Dublin Core description elements were evaluated. Not all elements were considered as necessary for the minimal description of a digital image. To avoid ambiguous use of the selected elements the EVA project described the semantic interpretation in detail. The next step was to translate the description elements into XML-elements. The rational behind this is explained further on in the article. As the EVA system is based on a relational database management system, the XML-elements had to be connected to database fields. The table below illustrates the metadata elements that are used in the project. It can be observed that the EVA interpretation of the Dublin Core qualifier in some cases is related to the original photograph and in others to its digital surrogate.
| Dublin Core Qualifier | EVA interpretation of the DC qualifier | Element in XML file (part of EVOlite DTD) | Field name in DBMS of EVA system (relation between tables is not given) |
| Title | Short description in the original language of what is visible on the digital image. The title can include a date. | Title (required) | Title |
| Creator | Name of photographer that took the original photograph | Photographer (optional) | Photographer |
| Subject / Keyword | Descriptive terms related to the content in the original language according to the documentation policy as used by the local archive. No adjustment to any common authority list | Subject (optional) | Subject |
| Description | Free text description of what is visible on the digital image. | Description (optional) | Description |
| Publisher | Name of archive that provides the EVA system with the images. | Archive (required) | Archive |
| Date | Date connected to the
creation of the original photograph. Two alternatives: Exact date (day/month/year) Or Period: (begin year) and (end year) |
Date (optional) (day | month | year) (note: only ‘year’ is required) Timeperiod (optional) (beginyear | endyear) |
Date_day / Date_month /
Date_year Year_ begin / Year_end |
| Identifier | Name of the reference image and the thumbnail image. | Location (required). This element has two attributes: thumbnail and refimg | Thumbnail Image |
| Language | Language used in the elements: title, description, subject/keyword and coverage. | Not a separate XML-element but an attribute of an “EVOlite” element | |
| Relation | Reference to original photograph in the physical archive, e.g. its inventory code. | Relation (optional) | Relation |
| Coverage | All geographic terms connected to the description in the national language (e.g. street, district, city, and country). No adjustment to any common authority list. | Geography (optional) | Geography |
| Type | Not used | ||
| Format | Not used | ||
| Source | Not used | ||
| Rights | Not used. Note: the archive creates a separate “Copyright statement” that is valid for its complete collection that is available online. |
Table 2: Description elements used by the EVA project for the description of the images that are available in the EVA system
It should be noted that the EVA system has only three obligatory description elements: a title, the names of the thumbnail and reference images and the collection holder (archive). In principle this is enough to give an end user, in a sensible way on a minimal level, access to the collection of the historical images. This minimal documentation scheme is quite a contrast with the ambitious extensive EVO description concept as described above. But the creation of descriptions is very labor intensive and both archives have already descriptions according to their own tradition available. The archive information systems used by the City archives of Antwerp and London Metropolitan Archives cover all kinds of archival sources and serve more purposes than ‘just’ resource discovery of photographic units for long distance access. It turned out to be more efficient to agree on a limited generic set of description elements that can be extracted automatically from the local information system than to create a separate extensive documentation scheme according to the EVO concept.
For the implementation of the data exchange between the local archive information systems and the central EVA system the project decided to use the XML standard. This is an application independent data structure. For each description of a photograph a separate XML file is created. An XML document contains special instructions called tags, which usually enclose identifiable parts of the document. The tags that are used by the project are given in the third column of table 2. The elements that are allowed are specified in a DTD (document type definition). The DTD used by the EVA system is called ‘EVOlite DTD’[10]. In this way self-describing documentation units are created. Two examples of XML formatted descriptions can be found in figure 1.
The creation of the XML files in principle is the responsibility of the archives. Within the project software and procedures were developed to assist them in the creation of output in XML format. In the future probably more and more information systems will facilitate the creation of data in XML format and it will become easier to manage data consistency between a local archive management system and the Web-based access system. Just like with the images the XML files are sent via FTP to the server of the EVA system. The archives can independently add, change and delete descriptions. The process is illustrated in scheme 2.
 |
| Figure 1: Two example descriptions in
XML-format according to the EVOlite DTD. Both have the obligatory elements ‘title’, ‘archive’ and ‘location’. Next to that the descriptions contain several of the other optional elements |
 |
| Scheme 2: Illustration of documentation production principle of the EVA system.
Archives create XML files, subtracted from the local archive information system. The XML files are sent by the standard Internet protocol FTP to the server of the EVA system. Archives can add, delete and replace XML files independently. |
The EVA system is an information system designed mainly to provide access to individual photographs that are part of distributed photographic collections. Via the Internet [2] the user can get access to a catalogue of historical photographs of the current content providers of the project and search and browse through the description fields. The user can view digital images of historical photographs and order prints and digital images. The user can be any individual person or organization, e.g. multimedia industry and publishers. To facilitate access to as much users as possible some multilingual functions are part of the system. This is described in the next paragraph. The EVA system makes it possible for any type of user to order specific items, but the actual transaction between the user and the owner of the item (the archive) is done directly between the user and the archive. The system will inform the user on prices, formats and shipping procedures of the item the user is interested in. The basic principle of the EVA system is given in scheme 3.
 |
| Scheme 3: Basic principle of the EVA system. |
As can be seen in scheme 3 the EVA system aims at two types of usage: End-users interested to have access to a catalogue of images and descriptions and users interested in the results of the EVA project and the model of the EVA system. Based on the information on the Web site an archive employee e should be able to evaluate the relevance of the project results for the conversion and dissemination of its own collection.
The XML formatted descriptions are automatically converted to the database on which the EVA system is based. The fields of this database are given in the fourth column of table 2. Periodically the database is refreshed with new information that is sent to the server by the archives with the help of the FTP protocol. The interface between the database and the end-user consists of several Web pages. Image 2 contains the advanced search screen of the system. The input fields are based on the database that contains information that originates from the XML formatted files provided by the archives.
 |
| Image 2: Screen dump of advanced search screen of EVA system. |
One of the goals of the project is to facilitate the searching of images in several languages. This paragraph briefly describes how the project implemented this requirement [11].
As photographs by nature do not contain character strings, a multilingual query function could only be based on texts that cover the domain of the scenes visible on the photographs. Because the project could not find an existing corpus of terms or a thesaurus that sufficiently matches the content of the images it was decided to develop a specific “EVA-lexicon”. This was done by collecting many kinds of electronic texts that have a relation with the photographs to be converted. The data from London Metropolitan Archives was in English and the City archives of Antwerp provided Dutch texts. The first step towards the creation of the EVA lexicon was the automatic extraction of the Dutch and English terms. A manual editing process was part of this step that resulted in a list of 6.000 terms. The Dutch part of this list of terms (or lexicon) was translated in English and the English items were translated in Dutch. Then all terms were translated to an additional language, German, to demonstrate the possibility to retrieve descriptions in another language than the original one. In principle the lexicon can be extended with additional terms and translations. The result of the lexicon was reviewed and adjusted by the project partners. As an example two of the 6.000 terms are given. The English term “Church”, the German term “Kirche” and the Dutch term “Kerk” are available in the lexicon. Another entry in the lexicon is the English “Building”, the German “Gebäude” and the Dutch “Gebouw”. The terms originally come from the textual descriptions from London Metropolitan Archives and/or the City archives of Antwerp.
In order to achieve more extended hits and improved results of the database search, the terms in the lexicon are connected with a network of related expressions. This is done in the so-called “expansion list” that defines broader and narrower relations. This man-made expansion list is created in English, because all project partners can review a list in this language. The expansion list contains, for example, the broader term “Building” with its narrower term “Church”. Based on this English expansion list both German and Dutch expansions can be created because the translations are available in the lexicon. In case a lexicon term in any given language has more than one meaning in one or both of the other two languages, the synonyms are entered in the lexicon.
 |
| Scheme 4: Implementation of multilingual search facilities in EVA system. |
The available lexicon and expansion lists are used by a software component that is able to process a search string typed in by a user in the interface of the EVA system. This piece of software, more or less a ‘black box’, is called the Query Translation and Expansion (QTE) component [12]. This QTE component evaluates the search string of the user, tries to find a translation, synonym or "expanded" term and constructs a search string in the standard query language SQL. This SQL statement is processed by the EVA system and the output is presented to the user.
For the moment the implementation of the multilingual search facility can be considered as a prototype. The lexicon and expansion list can be adjusted without changing the QTE component. The component pre-processes the human readable lexicon and expansion list. After adjusting the list a new pre-processing step has to be executed.
As can be seen in scheme 4 the quality of the currently implemented multilingual search functionality very much depends on the extend to which the descriptive texts (where the lexicon is based on) corresponds with the data in the XML-files submitted to the EVA system later on in the project. Another quality factor is the influence of the manual editing actions that are part of the construction process of the lexicon.
Other collections can join the EVA system. In order to evaluate the possibilities a collection should pay attention to the following issues:
1. Do you have a photographic collection that is available for access by users via the Web?
2. Do you have digital master files that facilitate creation of derivatives (reference images / thumbnails) according to the EVA guidelines (see table 1)?
3. Do you have a description format of images that can be mapped with the description format of EVA system (see table 2)?
4. Are you prepared to consider the optional activities required to expand the lexicon and expansion list with terms that cover the specific domain of your photo collection? It is even possible to expand the system with more languages than the currently available English, German and Dutch.
5. Can you deliver documentation in XML format? For each individual photo an XML file according to the EVOlite dtd should be created. (see the examples in figure 2)
6. Do you have an order procedure statement that describes the formats, prices and usage of image reproductions?
7. Do you have a copyright statement that is applicable to all online images?
8. Can you receive and process orders that are sent by the EVA system in an email?
9. Can you upload data (images / documentation) via FTP to the server of the EVA system?
10. Are you prepared to pay for the data-transmission and data-storage of your collection (images / description) that is part of the EVA system?
If all questions are answered positive it will not be difficult to join the EVA system and present your collection to a huge user community. More information can be found on the EVA Web site.
The current version of the EVA system is an important end result of the now finished EVA project. In another sense it is also the starting point for further enhancement and fine-tuning in the future. We cannot foresee yet to what extend other collections and end-users are interested to use the system the adjustments will be based on presently unknown factors. We think, however, that the actual version of the EVA system facilitates both collection holders and image users in an efficient way.
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René van Horik
Researcher / Project manager
NIWI
Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services
P.O. box 95110
1090 HC Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Rene.van.horik@niwi.knaw.nl
<http://www.niwi.knaw.nl/>
René van Horik is employed as a researcher and project manager at NIWI (Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services). He is involved in research and projects in the field of the conversion, dissemination and archiving of cultural heritage sources.
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For citation purposes:
van Horik, R. "Archives and Photographs: the ‘European Visual Archive’ Project (EVA)", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/eva/>
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By Catherine Webb and Marieke Napier - January 2001
The complexity, variety and sheer bulk of information coming out of the European Union (EU) institutions could easily be described as ‘mind bending’. From the daily Official Journal to COM and SEC documents through to CD-ROMS, databases, internet sites and the plethora of free newsletters and leaflets, finding a way through the maze is a complicated affair and many people get lost on the way. Catherine Webb introduces the European Information Association (EIA), an organisation that takes on this challenge and Marieke Napier reports on a recent workshop on Electronic Sources of EU Information held by the EIA.
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European information
specialists in public, academic and commercial organisations have
been battling with the tide of EU information for many years. In
1991 however, those working in European Documentation Centres
based in UK universities decided to broaden their own
professional association to include people from other sectors
working with EU information. A result of their desire to share
experience with others was the formation of the European
Information Association (EIA) in 1991 [1].
The EIA is a professional organisation based in Manchester for people providing or interested in information with a European dimension. Our members currently include public, academic and government libraries, European Documentation Centres, Euro Info Centres, local authorities, publishers, companies and law firms. Members come from some 32 countries – including two in New Zealand and one in Australia!
We aim to bring members into contact with each other so they can exchange experience and expertise, discuss and solve common problems, become better trained, develop publications which will help them in their work, and lobby the EU institutions to influence decisions on European information provision.
We achieve these objectives in a number of ways. The directory of members gives details of people in the Association allowing them to make informal contacts. We encourage members to hold meetings locally and find out who their fellow EIA members are in their area. We organise an annual conference to which all members are invited along with guest speakers who are specialists in their particular field. This year’s conference which takes place in March, discusses enlargement of the EU and the information implications of that for existing Member States and applicant countries.
Our journal, European Information, is published quarterly and provides a published forum for debate, comment and analysis of the world of European information. EIA Update is a monthly newsletter keeping members up-to-date with the Association’s activities and new publications and Web sites in the field.
A particularly successful venture has been the creation of an e-mail discussion list called Eurotalk. This was set up in 1998 and allows members to get help with queries, pass on news and views – or gripe about the subject! The system works by using a central address to which members send their comments. Any message which is sent to this address is automatically circulated to the e-mail addresses of everyone else who has subscribed to the system. Examples of recent messages include:
Eurotalk is averaging 40 to 50 messages a month at present and members appear to find it a particularly useful resource due to the very quick responses they receive. They can get help with queries within hours, sometimes even minutes, of putting up a message. Eurotalk is a ‘closed’ list (ie members have to be subscribed by a listowner – they can’t just add themselves) so only members can access it and put up messages. This prevents the dreaded ‘spam’ and other inappropriate items from being circulated. Messages are mostly in English although other languages are also used from time to time and they are archived for two years. Anyone can access the archives from the JISC mail site [2].
We also run a programme of training seminars and courses primarily in the UK although we have also been invited to give these further afield. Our trainers have taken courses in Australia, Greece, Sweden and Denmark amongst others. Particularly popular are our Internet courses especially our ‘EU legal information on the internet’ which has attracted a wide range of delegates and which will be running again in two locations in 2001.
We also organise a prestigious annual conference in association with the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht called ‘Keep ahead with European information’ which takes place every November in Maastricht. This attracts delegates from a wide range of countries – both in the EU and outside it – and from a variety of organisations. The 2000 conference programme included speakers from the Commission, OECD, EuropaPlus, PreLex and ended with a fascinating account of the access to documents policy by the European Ombudsman. As the conference takes place over two days, the delegates have time to meet each other and ‘network’ which leads to more fruitful information exchange. The 2001 conference will take place on 19 and 20 November and promises to be another successful event.
The EIA also produces publications to help members locate EU information. These are all written by EIA members based on their experience of the subject and the problems they have encountered trying to find information or use particular sources. Our EIA Quick Guide series has been particularly popular for example. The guides which are just two sides of A4 explain very concisely how to use a range of European sources or find out more about the way the EU works. So, for example, titles include ‘How to trace a Directive’, ‘The European Commission, 1999 – 2005’, ‘How to trace EC case law’ and ‘EU information on the Internet’.
We also try to improve the production and dissemination of EU information through the prestigious EIA Awards for European Information Sources awarded annually. EIA members nominate sources they have found particularly useful over the past year and a small panel of experts judges the nominations. We have found this to be particularly influential in raising not only our own profile, but also that of the organisations who have received the awards. Certain Directorate-Generals within the Commission for example who have been award winners say that other departments have contacted them to find out what made their particular publication or website a winner and have then sought to emulate their product. In this small, but significant way, the Association is attempting to improve the overall standard of EU related sources.
In summary - as you have read, the EIA is a very active association run by a committee of six EIA members and managed on a day-to-day basis by a small staff in Manchester. We aspire to be a very practical organisation producing products and services, which are of practical use to our members. If you are an information worker who has to face EU enquiries, or if you are simply interested in EU information generally and would like to find out more about the EIA and how we can help you, then please contact me or visit our Web site:
The Electronic Sources of EU Information workshop given by the EIA was held at City University, London on Wednesday 6th December. There were about 20 of us attending the course, consisting mainly of Academic, Law and Business librarians. The majority of attendees were from the UK but there was also an Estonian lady from Tartu University and a Norwegian lady from Telenor, the leading Media Company in Norway, which gave a more European feel to the day.
Ian Mayfield, a European Documentation Centre (EDC) librarian from Portsmouth University, presented the workshop. Ian gives similar sessions about 3 times a year at different venues; obviously, in our constantly evolving digital world, the content of these sessions regularly changes.
After we had all introduced ourselves and given our aims for the day Ian began with an introduction to electronic sources of EU information. The actual EU information focused on during the workshop was to include:
Ian pointed out that he would be concentrating on Web based material and not covering CD-ROM's. This was mainly due to the sheer volume of information now available on the Web.
The sources to be covered were:
After agreement by the workshop attendees that it would be useful Ian gave a brief overview of the various European institutions and their publications. As someone with no formal training on European matters it was quite a relief to have explained to me who the actual decision making bodies are and what powers they possess. An introduction was also given to the key publications that they produce.
Over the morning some time was spent on the main official information databases for legal and judicial information. A considerable while was given to CELEX [3], the main legislative database for the EU. Ian also covered EUR-LEX [4], a free Web tool that was introduced about 18 months ago and EUDOR [5] which is more of a document delivery system. Rumours have recently been flourishing that next year a common portal to all three will be available. Two databases, The Legislative Observatory (OEIL) [6], PRE-LEX [7], that trace the progress of legislation were also discussed. Although the perspective is a UK one a number of the databases are available in languages other than English. All the databases were demonstrated in as much detail as was possible given the inconsistent factor of Web speed. As part of the documentation workshop attendees are provided with a comprehensive sheet comparing the different databases and detailing their URLs.
After a much needed coffee break time was provided for a hands on session, allowing everyone try the databases out for themselves. A list of example queries were available to get us started. There were enough PCs for one between two, which encouraged further interaction between us all. I was lucky enough to find myself sat with someone who worked as a European information specialist for Nottingham Trent University and had areas of interest already in mind. Passwords were available to give us access to the non-free services.
The rest of the morning was spent covering an extensive number of official non-legislative databases and key Web sites. Some of those more useful to people working in research and development include the Cordis Web site [8], ECLAS [9]- the main database of the Central library of the Commission, EUREKA [10], and new services like RAPID [11] and Euractive [12].
At 1pm we broke for lunch and were led through what seemed like the City University labyrinth to one of the refectories. After an extensive buffet and a big piece of chocolate gateaux those of us who managed to find our way back to the Open Learning Centre continued with commercial databases. Most of the librarians attending the day use at least one of the commercial databases available and all were forthcoming with feedback. The majority of commercial databases seemed to be versions of either Celex or SCAD with idiosyncrasies. During the day there was some discussion over the merits of different products and many attendees seemed to have their favourites. Ian recommended that although familiarity is one reason for keeping a product you should be willing to trial out new ones. However the consensus was that once you find a database that you are happy it is worth sticking with it, whilst keeping an open mind about the other products out there.
A number of the databases constituted what a colleague of Ian's had coined as 'New generation services'. The last session was spent investigating these. By 'New Generation' Ian meant services that were Web based, drew on information from a number of sources and included the full text. These databases also often included value added information such as commentaries, were highly customisable, frequently updated and sometimes possible to personalise. The main examples of these were EU Direct [13], EU Interactive [14] and Know Europe [15]. A new product called WestLaw [16] was also introduced by some of the Law Librarians. The day ended with another hands on session and time for more questions.
The workshop is an excellent overview for people already working in the EU information retrieval area and for those who just needing a summary of what's out there. Although it was very focused it would be possible to make it through the day with no previous EU information experience, though you may feel that you start reaching saturation point around lunchtime (probably just after the gateaux!) The documentation provided was excellent and the workshop atmosphere was very inductive to questions asking and sharing experiences.
To find out more about when the next Electronic Sources of EU Information course or other similar courses are being held consult the EIA Web site [17].
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Catherine Webb
EIA Manager
European Information Association
Central Library
St Peter’s Square
Manchester
M2 5PD
UK
eia@manchestergb.demon.co.uk
URL: <http://www.eia.org.uk/>
Phone: +44 161 228 3691
Fax: +44 161 236 6547
Marieke
Napier
Information Officer
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
England
BA2 7AY
m.napier@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Marieke Napier is editor of the Cultivate Interactive Web magazine.
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For citation purposes:
Webb, C. & Napier, M "The European Information Association – Helping You through the EU Minefield", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/eia/>
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By Dominique Delouis - January 2001
Dominique Delouis reports on the Remote Access to Museum Archives (RAMA) Project, a 10-year piece of work aimed at making information and communication technologies available to museums in the most user-friendly and cost effective way. The final goals of the project were to make museum collections more widely accessible, bring larger audiences to the museum premises and create larger revenues to support investment in multimedia technology. He also talks about two follow up projects to RAMA: The MENHIR Project which ran from 1997 to 1998 and the OpenHeritage Project which has just started.
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The RAMA collaborative RDT project was launched in January 1992 and finished in December 1995. After the European Museum Network project (1989-1992), it was the first successful attempt to link great European museums through telecommunication networks. Its initiation was before the Internet became widely known (1996). In 1996, the Museums On Line company took on the challenge to transform the research results achieved by the RAMA consortium into the innovative Multimedia European Network of High Quality Image Registration (MENHIR) project, which attempted to build an Internet catalogue of museum images based on a unique ISO standard. It resulted in an online catalogue of 120,000 images from a variety of large, small and medium museums in Europe. The final step to making this innovation useful to small and medium sized museums is the launch of the OpenHeritage IST project in January 2001. OpenHeritage will network 30 museums in five regions of Europe with a novel multimedia collection management system. Regional portals will highlight the cultural heritage of the five regions to attract visitors. And, finally, a global portal will market the digital resources produced by the museums to value their collections.
Cultural institutions around the world possess proprietary images and information which are of great interest to scholars, advertisers, publishers, commercial enterprises, and the public at large. Yet there have been only limited attempts by museums and private enterprises to capitalise on this market interest. In the early 1990s, however, technology became available which permitted images to be electronically stored and disseminated by telecommunication networks, and later by Internet, to a wide variety of interested parties.
In 1992, the most significant project dealing with the "electronic museum" linked some of Europe's most famous museums. Remote Access to Museum Archives (RAMA) [2] wrote common software to interconnect all of the different museum databases participating in the project including the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence, the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The project team management was funded with an initial grant from the European Union's Research and Development in Advanced Communications in Europe (RACE) Programme of € 9 million.
The eight original RAMA member museums that formed the RAMA consortium were:
The RAMA museums worked with telecommunications companies throughout Europe. These companies provided technical and software development support for the project. The companies included L-Cube in Athens, Brameur in Great Britain, CompArt in Berlin, Eutelis in Paris, Telefonica Sistemas in association with the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, and Telesystemes at France Telecom Group in Paris.
RAMA was the first European project in which museum multimedia information was made accessible via broadband telecommunication links. Another unique feature was the fact that RAMA linked up existing museum databases to form a heterogeneous system, so that restructuring individual systems was unnecessary. Requirements were established by the RAMA group, which stated that the system must be user friendly with software interfaces designed to be simple and easy to manipulate for users of all levels of computer knowledge. The RAMA network acted as a database server that hosted the museum's archiving system.
In 1993, the RAMA user requirements were captured during an extensive and thorough process. During the last quarter of 1993, the first prototype of the RAMA system was tested at Museo Arqueologico Nacional in Madrid, at the Beazley Archives of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and at Musee d'Orsay in Paris. The purpose of these trials was twofold. On one hand, they played an important role in capturing the final user requirements. In this respect the prototype served as a reference point, which helped future users to express their needs as precisely as possible. On the other hand, the trials were expected to provide the system designers with useful information for the further development of the system. The trial produced positive results and important feedback for continuing developments.
The RAMA museums concentrated on the technical realisation of the system; installing equipment, planning the usability trials and addressing the concerns of the museum community. At the same time they extended the information for their databases by scanning images, recording sound and video samples. All museums, except one, had only textual databases at the start of the project. The exception was Musee d'Orsay, which had a fully developed image database. The technical partners continued their task of developing a simple and clear user interface, developing the software for the RAMA system - connecting seven different existing databases (a range of software programs on various platforms and equipment). They also advised the museums about equipment, telecommunication needs, and other issues as they arose.
At about this same time, the RAMA project team began to explore the feasibility of perpetuating its work through the creation of two new organisations: one providing public purpose, public financed services, the other a "for profit" commercial service which would generate new sources of revenue for the museums. For some time research was underway exploring which aspects of the RAMA project were most appropriate for commercialisation. A marketing bureau, a member of the RAMA project management team, and some member museums conducted the initial market survey of approximately 150 cultural institutions from each country (Greece, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, Spain and France).
RAMA raised a lot of interest in the museum community and also from the political spheres. It was presented at national and international conferences such as Electronic and Visual (EVA) in London and Paris, ICHIM in Washington, DC, CIDOC conferences in Ljubljana and in Cambridge with ICHIM, etc. It supported the European approach to the Museums and Gallery project issued from the G7 summit on the Information Society held in Brussels on February 1995.
Created to exploit the results of the RAMA project, Museums On Line and MUSEA promoted the Multimedia European Network of High quality Image Registration (MENHIR) project in Europe within the European Union programme ESPRIT. The idea was to offer a genuine alternative to CORBIS through collaboration with authors and content providers. With MENHIR, Museums On Line developed a Multimedia European Network to increase the number of valuable high quality image archives (digitisation, indexing, registration and identification for the protection of high quality images) and to set up business partnerships for efficient marketing of these archives using Internet technology.
The main activity was the creation of high quality image databases for image rights-holders. The publishing sector being the main target, MENHIR partners assisted publishing companies, either traditional publishing houses or multimedia producers (DVB and TV products, CD-ROMs, Web promotion activities, etc.), advertisers and other companies, to locate and acquire content in their archives through a licensing service. In the space of twenty-one months MENHIR was developed and installed in seven European countries (West and East) and one Mediterranean country, the protected high quality images were promoted and marketed through Museums On Line Web site with free access to vignettes, a magazine and a shop.
The project provided a full software and hardware package to digitise, identify and market digital images on the Web. The package was compliant with the ISO International Standards and with the rules on the Intellectual Property Rights harmonised at a European level. The end result was a set of 120.000 high quality images that initiated the copyright sales. To achieve the above goal, Museums On Line, as the promoters of the project, drove for a Consortium gathering museums and photo archives/agencies as providers of digital content and an on-line publisher as developer of the promotion site and potential user of those contents. In addition, a collective rights society was acting as legal adviser.
In order to market efficiently the digital assets of medium and small museums, the main objectives of this new project are:
The OpenHeritage Project [3] will design, verify, implement through adequate enabling technologies and validate a comprehensive model for the valorisation of the European Cultural Heritage by leveraging sustainable innovation and by exploiting the opportunities offered by the "new economy" with its rapid shift towards the accessibility of user-driven cultural services and "experiential" entertainment values.
The ongoing shift towards a new "cultural economy" based on intangible services and on accessible, on-demand "experiences" places museums in the uncomfortable position of having to compete (in terms of entertainment and experience value) in a new, unusual horizon subject to market forces. This is a particularly severe problem for the multitude of "minor" museums that represent up to 95% of the existing heritage in most European countries. The project will address the above scenario by providing an actual solution based on proven and innovative technologies that will be self-sustainable.
Analysing the development of museums over the last decade, it appears that they are entering into the new economy after a 10 year process of profound modifications in their approaches in teaching and giving larger audiences access to their collections, particularly in using information technologies.
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Dominique Delouis
President Cultural Heritage On Line
24, rue Sainte Marthe
75010 Paris
France
ddelouis@easynet.fr
URL: <http://www.museum-images.com/>
Phone: +33 1 4803 3079
Dominique Delouis graduated in Computational Engineering and Management at the Ecole Centrale in Lille, France and in Information System Analysis and Design at Sup'Telecom in Paris. In September 2000,he set up the Cultural Heritage On Line company that is involved in the OpenHeritage project. Previously, he was in charge of a number of information technology projects, as a project manager at France Telecom: RAMA and Electronic Document Interchange between Libraries (EDIL/Libraries programme). Marketing manager of Museums On Line, he coordinated the MENHIR project. Dominique Delouis is also a consultant for UNESCO.
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For citation purposes:
Delouis, D. "Online Museums: from Research to Innovation, from RAMA to OpenHeritage", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/rama/>
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By Sidsel Hindal and Tone Moseid - January 2001
Netting Local
History [1] is an initiative that follows
up the request from the Norwegian government for a closer
collaboration between archives, libraries and museums (ALM). This
network-project, which is initiated and organised by the
Norwegian Directorate for Public Libraries, covers seven local
projects with different aims and activities.
Its main objectives are to develop collaboration in the sector of museums, libraries and archives and try out network organisation in the development of public libraries in order to improve the public's access to records on local history by utilising the digital technologies.
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The Norwegian Directorate for Public Libraries [2] is a directorate subordinate to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs [3], with special responsibility for matters relating to public libraries. As laid out in the Public Library Act [4], the Directorate should act as a co-ordinating and initiating body, working for development and promotion of public libraries by offering professional advice and consultancy services. In addition the directorate is a consultant and advisory body to the Ministry of Cultural Affairs.
In Norway as in several other European countries the government has requested closer collaboration between archives, libraries and museums (ALM). The Ministry of Cultural Affairs presented this view in a white paper St. meld. 22 1999-2000. Kjelder til kunnskap og oppleving December 1999 [5]. "Om arkiv, bibliotek og museum i ei IKT-tid og om bygningsmessige rammevilkår på kulturområdet. (Sources to knowledge and adventure. Archive, library and museum in a society based on information-technology)". An important principle in the report is easy access to recorded heritage and collections of items for the public. The report was recently treated by the Parliament in December 2000 and received massive political support.
The Norwegian Directorate for Public Libraries felt called upon to do something regarding ALM and in August 1999 the Netting Local History project was initiated.
According to regulations (recommended guidelines for the county and public libraries) both institutions are instructed to make studies of local history available [6]. The county libraries are obliged to have a local collection, which geographically covers the county. This means that many Norwegian public libraries have recorded material, for example collections of local newspapers, photos, letters, church records and local censuses.
The Norwegian Directorate for Public Libraries found the local history area one suitable for collaboration between the public libraries, museums and archives. A common situation, independent of the size of the local community, is that valuable material is spread among several institutions and private persons. Often one is not aware of what material exists. The public's interest in this area was another reason for selecting local history. The dual aspect of local history , its character of being both a branch of research and a movement with considerable popular support, gives local history an extraordinarily strong position in Norway [7]. Every year the municipalities spend 6-8 million Euro on fees for the authors of "bygdebooks" (community books). In addition there is a considerable, yearly production of publications about local history associations, museums, sports clubs, banks, power stations, industry and other local enterprises.
When this project started up there were several ongoing projects, their main contribution was to work on parts of the development that the Netting Local History project is on the threshold of. By organising seven local projects in a network-project The Norwegian Directorate of Public Libraries aims to develop and illustrate the public libraries` presentation of local history. The idea is that projects that involve different ALM institutions may generate some new solutions for public libraries.
The public libraries in Austevoll, Fusa, Porsgrunn, Sogndal, Stavanger and Ål and the Library of Telemark (Telemarksbiblioteket) are all participating in the national project. The local projects have slightly different objectives, subjects and organisation, but they all aim to utilise Internet in their presentations of local history. One of the selection criteria was that the libraries should have one or more partners among the archives, museums and`/or educational institutions.
Below is a handful of the local projects:
Sogndal public library [8] is collaborating with The Heiberg Collections [9] and the County Archives of Sogn og Fjordane [10]. Since June 2000 the three institutions have provided a reference service which allows the public to request local history from the county of Sogn og Fjordane. The service is called Lokalhistorisk spørjevev [11], which means "Ask the Web about local history". Archivists, historians and librarians in the three institutions are working together on answering and suggesting appropriate resources.
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| Sogndal, Sogn og Fjordane County,
around 1900 A ox owned by a farmer from the district - used for transporting goods and for the work at the farm. The photo belongs to the collection of the County Archives of Sogn og Fjordane (SFFf-88010.0475) |
Both the questions and the answers given are available on the Internet and it is possible to search for the material by subject. In this way the information will be available to the broader community, not to just the person who made the request. The overall scope is to develop an improved reference service for the public on local history.
Another part of the project is to establish library services for the museum and the county archives. The local catalogue aims to cover the collections of books and serials in the museum, county archives and the public library, and will in addition report to the national union catalogue. One of the tasks, indexing local serials in a database, is carried out in co-operation with the county library of Sogn og Fjordane. This database is called Fjognedok [12]. The National Library of Norway [13] also has an interest in Fjognedok, which they consider to be a pilot project. In the future The National Library wants the county libraries to be responsible for cataloguing articles from local serials and serving the National catalogue, "NORART".
At Telemark Library [14], Telemark data on the Internet, now a finished project, offers searchable databases of local historical material from the county of Telemark. By including this project the experience achieved has been transmitted to the other local projects.
Porsgrunn public library [15] in Telemark has developed a Web site giving access to digitised urban history, consisting of both digitised local books, photos and a unique collection of archive material from the period 1940-1945. The material is to some extent cross-linked, giving the possibility of 'jumping to photos of a building directly from the text-based description of the same building in the digitised "bygdebook"'. Along with the library's own catalogue on local history this gives a "one stop shop" resource to available material on this topic.
Austevoll public library [16] in Hordaland and the municipality of Austevoll are working on a Web site on local history from Austevoll. Inter-municipal archives in Hordaland and Regional Archives of Bergen [17] are contributing by providing local material from Austevoll from their archives. They can also find specific persons, stories and subjects by "deepdiving" into the material. On the Web site the material is organised into 9 subjects and 6 periods of time, from prehistoric time to today. The user of the Web site will be able to choose whether he wishes to approach the material by choosing a specific subject or a period of time.
Austevoll
public library is responsible for publishing and transmitting
knowledge about the material. In collaboration with Mediasenteret
in Bergen, the structure and the design on the Web is made as
simple and easy to use as possible. Pupils in elementary school
are the main target group. In order to make the material further
available for children and youths, efforts have been made to
personalise it. The results of the "deepdivings" in the archives
make it possible to use the story of one particular person to
illustrate a period of time or a historical phenomenon. In
addition to the processed material on the Web site, they are
developing a database on which the public may search directly
into the original documents.
Fusa public library [18] is publishing material from the "bygdebook" on the Internet in a project that runs parallel to the editing of the new "bygdebook". The digital version aims to be more than just a Web-copy of the hard copy. These two "editions" will in many ways complement each other. During the editing process the public may contribute, via the Web, with information and comments.
The educational project at Stavanger Public Library [19], based on local history and research, emphasises the participating of pupils rather than presenting information on the Web. The starting point was Stavanger Public Library's extensive collection of books and publications on the local history of Stavanger and the surrounding district, Rogaland, and the library's long experience of handing on this knowledge to schoolchildren, to a great extent by traditional methods. When the Norwegian Petroleum Museum [20] opened in 1999, Stavanger public library presented the idea of a joint educational project based on local history and research. The project has two aspects: General information about the library and in-depth studies based on the local history section.
Ål Public Library [21] in Buskerud is running a local project called The Home Town - a reflection of Norway and the world. The main objectives are:
By presenting the history of Ål which combines knowledge, adventure and active participation, the library want to inspire the pupils' to learn. The result of the collaboration between the local school, the public library and the local heritage museum will be an interactive presentation on the Internet of texts, photos and videos launched in autumn 2001.
Historical themes have been selected with the intention of encouraging collaboration between several local institutions and fulfilling the intentions of the National Curriculum Guidelines for the 10-year compulsory school (L97). These Guidelines underline the importance of the local community and the creation of identity – "by working with the past the pupils will create identity". At the next stage the knowledge about their local society will help them to understand, compare and respect, more complex societies and other cultures.
As mentioned in the introduction the main objectives are:
In addition we have a list of subordinated objectives:
In Norway most of the public libraries are small-scale institutions with an average of 1.8 people power per year per institution. By initiating a network-project we thought it would be feasible for small libraries to participate, and hopefully the project would be more visible, both for the public and the people working in the ALM and educational sector.
The Norwegian Directorate for Public Libraries' role is to work as co-ordinator and consultant. The local co-ordinators and the authors are organised as a working group, which meets two or three times per year. The seminars take place in the different local communities with participation from the local partners in the project we visit.
Among the issues which are raised at the seminars are common problem areas, such as copyright, presentations, co-operation and technical solutions. Experts on the different topics are used as speakers, and in some cases the local co-ordinators are asked to prepare written contributions to the seminars. By having this time to share experiences and discuss different ideas, problems and solutions these seminars have so far fulfilled the intention of being a source of inspiration.
As described in the article the local projects have different profiles and target groups. This was partly part of the selection criteria, presenting different ways of approaching local history and the new technologies.
For several of the projects, children and youths are the main target group due to the importance of local community and tradition in the National Curriculum Guidelines for the 10-year compulsory school (L97).
In this project we want to underline that local history is not
only of importance for the population in a particular region but
has a much broader meaning. A view reflected in the National
Curriculum Guidelines and in the title of Ål's project
The Home Town - a reflection of Norway and the
world.
None of the seven projects are of interest only to the local population. For example Porsgrunn, with its unique collection of material from the Second World War, makes a small contribution to the enormous and complex description of this important period of history.
If we jump, both in time and place, to Stavanger on the western coast and our near past, the pupils who take part in the project at the public library and the Petroleum Museum are able to learn about the Petroleum Industry in the North Sea. An industry which only dates back to the end of the nineteen sixties. This recent part of Stavanger's history is at the same time both national and international history.
By exploiting the opportunities created by the advent of digital technologies the ALM institutions can give wide public access to a huge and valuable cultural heritage.
Netting Local History is only a minor contributor, and one the challenges for such a small country as Norway is the language. If we want a larger public than just the Scandinavian countries we need to translate the actual resources or at least the descriptions of them, a time and labour consuming task. So far, we have started by putting descriptions of the projects on our Web site.
More than halfway into the project period we are beginning to see some results. There is an increased level of local interest and commitment. Stavanger, Ål, Porsgrunn and Sogndal have all experienced interest from the public, other institutions and the media. Stavanger plans to extend their project by including Stavanger Maritime Museum [22] and in Sogndal the National Library have also taken an interest. With regard to interest from politicians these projects have all gained a positive reputation, particularly in Austevoll. The politicians in this small and economically poor municipality outside Bergen have expressed a strong and binding interest by saying that culture is an area of priority and the project Local History from Austevoll will be carried on.
At national level we have established collaboration with The Norwegian Institute of Local History [23] and have disseminated information about the project to several cultural institutions and organisation. There is now awareness about Netting Local History in the ALM sector. As an end product we are planning a final seminar at the end of 2001 with participants from the ALM and educational sector and a compendium with articles on different issues related to the project.
The main challenge is to ensure some kind of continuation of Netting Local History after 2001. A national portal to the resources of local history in Norway is one idea. Hopefully we have an answer to this question by the end of this year.
If you have any comments about Netting Local History please send them to Sidsel Hindal [24].
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Tone Moseid
Norwegian Directorate for Public Libraries
P.O.B. 8145, Dep, N - 0033 Oslo, Norway
Phone: +47 21 02 17 28 (00)
Fax: + 47 21 02 17 01
tone.moseid@bibtils.no
URL: <http://www.bibtils.no/>
Sidsel Hindal
Norwegian Directorate for Public Libraries
P.O.B. 8145, Dep, N - 0033 Oslo, Norway
Phone: + 47 21 02 17 26 (00)
Fax: + 47 21 02 17 01
sidsel.hindal@bibtils.no
URL: <http://www.bibtils.no/>
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For citation purposes:
Hindal, S. and Moseid, T. "Netting Local History in Norway - An ALM Project", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/history/>
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By Dmitriy Luchkin - January 2001
The last issue of Cultivate Interactive featured an article on the creation of the Russian Cultural Heritage Network (RCHN) [1]. Dmitriy Luchkin continues the story by reporting on Russian Museums Online [2], the Russian Cultural Heritage Network’s main resource centre.
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Russian Museums Online was launched in May 1996 and the site now has about 30,000-45,000 visitors per month. Its comprehensive on line database contains 2,034 museums with detailed descriptions and images (in total about 9Gb) served by a powerful and easy to use search engine. Russian Museums Online is also a powerful guide to cultural Web sites. It currently holds approximately 550 detailed descriptions and ratings with most material presented in both English and Russian.
Thinking back on my memories of starting up Russian Museums Online the first thing that comes to mind is the enthusiasm that we all felt for it. We were pioneers in a new area and were in awe of the exciting elements we faced. We also had a strong awareness that the further we were challenged and got involved, the better we strengthened our positions. Whilst resolving different emerging issues we were constantly gaining experience. It was in this way that a considerable amount of the expertise that has been of value to us was accumulated by our team.
The key result of the initial activities carried out was the emergence of a development process. There were signs of a convergence between our social incentives and the needs of individuals; the development process successfully enabled a combination of the demands of the organisational environment and patterns of personal motivation shown by most of the staff. We luckily managed to organise the Russian Museums Online for release at a period when it was needed. At the time the process was not evaluated because the potential users had little idea about cultural Internet resources. A need for the product we were creating was never measured although it was easy to anticipate that the interest in Russian museums and galleries would gradually grow.
 |
| Figure 1: The Museum Maps section on Russian Museums Online |
It was lucky that from the start we had evaluated a number of different models of information dissemination through the Internet. We decided to include as many different museum resources as possible in Russian Museums Online's content. This was a decision that gives our visitors numerous benefits. It is much easier to use the site to find well-known museums than a group of distributed resources. In light of this an overall registration of Russian Museums was later conducted and this helped to gain information about the museums for which there was currently no Web site available. Through the accumulation of a tremendous amount of data the Russian Museums Online brand began to move up the ladder of popularity and success.
 |
| Figure 2: Surround video of the State Darwin Museum on Russian Museums Online |
The presentation of the information on the site was also helped by 'state-of-art' design. The site combines a placid colour palette with an appropriate and easy to use navigation system. Although most visitors now give us a very complimentary evaluation of the site we continue to renew and change the site. We believe that there are no limits to perfection; so both the database of museums and search engine are constantly under development. Additionally in order to expand our development we've been opening different services in response to the changing needs and interests of our visitors: cultural heritage professionals and the general public alike. The following significant sections of interactive communication have been recently added to Russian Museums Online:
 |
| Figure 3: Russian Museums Online's Navigation Buttons |
As a result of implementation of these initiatives we can say that our Web site gives visitors a real opportunity for artistic debate and intellectual, cultural and scientific exchange. The site brings together a lot of people, educates them and creates a virtual community.
So who exactly are the visitors to Russian Museums Online? They are students, teachers and professors who search for relevant information about Russian culture and art; artists, gallery and museum professionals who want to be informed what it’s going on in the culture and art fields. There are also many visitors who want to receive announcements and news about upcoming events while some people are just curious about Russian culture and art. Our target audience could be defined as professionals from the culture, art and museum communities and laypersons. Currently we don't manage to translate all the information being presented from Russian to English but we are working on it.
In conclusion Russian Museums Online is the most developed part of the Russian Cultural Heritage Network. The project aims to facilitate access to culture and use of the cultural heritage using new information and communication technologies. It also aims to put the Internet at the disposal of heritage professionals.
The RCHN hope to be an active partner in the newly formed Cultivate Russia.
1996 – The Russian Museums Online Web site was successfully launched as an interactive node for representation the Russian museums’ content and Russian Cultural Heritage’s promotion in general. By the end of 1996 the technological base of the project was prepared and the preliminary database of the Russian Museums created.
1997 - The structure of databases on the server was completed and transferred to MS SQL Server.
1998 - The Forum (Board for discussions and information exchange), where different users communicate with each other and conferences on the culture subject take place, was presented.
1999 - Detailed information about the Russian museums held on the database was considerably increased.
February 2000 - The Internet Learning Center was created. Each user can introduce a lecture on the culture and museums content subject as well as attend and look through it. All lectures after the selection have a free online access.
April 2000 - We receive the Intel Russian Internet Award on the Art nomination.
May 2000 - The number of the site visitors reached the 1,000,000 level
August 2000 - The Russian Museums Online resource celebrates its 4th birthday after reaching 1,111,111 visitors
1. Russian Museums
Online
URL: <http://www.museum.ru/>
2. Cultural Heritage
Networking in Russia: Permanently Upcoming Perspectives,
Dmitriy Luchkin, Cultivate Interactive, issue 2, 16 October
2000
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue2/russian/>
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Dmitriy Luchkin
Development and International Cooperation Manager
Russian Cultural Heritage Network
Dept. 110, State Darwin Museum Building
Vavilova Street 57, 117292 Moscow, Russia
Phone: 7 095 135 33 85
Dmitriy Luchkin is the Development and International Cooperation Manager for the Russian Cultural Heritage Network (RCHN).
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For citation purposes:
Luchkin, D. "Developing Russian Museums Online", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/russian/>
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By Daphne Charles - January 2001
Daphne Charles reports on new methods of generating and disseminating the National Monuments Record thesauri produced by English Heritage. By generating the thesauri as static HTML pages (capable of being viewed with most Web browsers) it has been possible to reduce the cost of publication, distribute digital copies online and offline, and meet the needs of a far wider range of users.
The thesauri constitute a popular resource for terminology control aimed at cultural heritage professionals engaged in computerisation of information on historic buildings, shipwrecks and archaeological sites. They have also proved very popular with non-specialists and the general public.
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It is a truth universally acknowledged that any cultural heritage institution in possession of a large collection of records must be in need of terminology control. If records are catalogued without standards, they cannot then be retrieved in any meaningful way by staff or customers, and the effort will have been wasted. If this is true even for a single data set, then for retrieval of data across multiple data sources and different institutions the importance of shared standards cannot be overstated. Use of classification schemes and thesauri is central to the creation of effective metadata for resource discovery and for full interoperability in such schemes as Dublin Core [1].
English Heritage has developed a series of thesauri in support of major computerisation projects, which have been widely adopted outside the National Monuments Record, and these have now been made available on-line.
Examples of NMR thesauri include the Thesaurus of Monument Types, which contains over 6,000 terms. The Thesaurus of Monument Types is used by archaeological excavation units, museums and local government Sites and Monuments Records. It has been incorporated into the exeGesIS Sites and Monuments software package, adopted by about 50 local and regional government authorities to date.
The National Monuments Record (NMR) formerly part of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England (RCHME) is England's lead body for heritage recording, and has kept its identity and role following the merger of RCHME with English Heritage in April 1999.
In addition to its substantial original archive holdings, the NMR maintains computerised records of over 350,000 historic buildings, archaeological sites and maritime wrecks, and 30,000 archaeological excavations on its NewHIS database. The excavation data is available on-line via the Archaeology Data Service [2].
English Heritage also maintains the computerised 'Lists' of over 500,000 legally protected historic buildings. This information will shortly be made accessible to the public via the Images of England Project, which will digitise a photograph of each Listed Buildings and make them available to the public on the Web. A prototype can already be seen [3], which gives a flavour of the images, text and search facilities.
English Heritage has a team of four staff dedicated to developing, disseminating and maintaining our thesauri and other reference data. This commitment has established the National Monuments Record as a leader in terminology development in the built and buried heritage sector, and several of the thesauri developed to support national projects have subsequently been adopted by other organisations.
In partnership with other cultural heritage institutions and through its role in FISHEN [4] (Forum on Information Standards in Heritage in England) recently renamed FISH and expanded to cover the whole of the British Isles, the Data Services Unit Standards team has also been responsible for the production of MIDAS, the Monument Inventory Data Standard [5]. MIDAS sets out the different data elements which need to be recorded in a monument inventory. The wordlists and thesauri recommended to support MIDAS are brought together as INSCRIPTION [6] and listed on the FISHEN Web site.
The Data Services Unit Standards team have contributed to a number of international initiatives, and are currently involved in the European Union HEREIN project to develop terminology for indexing of heritage policy documents, which will be available in French and Spanish as well as English.
An Oracle database hosts the thesauri, and has been used to produce printed output for some years. However the paper medium has a number of limitations, which hamper the drive to disseminate standards, promote their wider adoption and keep them up to date.
The 2nd edition of the Thesaurus of Monument Types (1998) was the last to be published in traditional paper form and is still obtainable at £20.00 (plus p&p). It runs to over 300 pages. Although some customers still prefer to have the paper version to hand, a large printed copy is quite unwieldy to use. Typically, a user might find a term in its hierarchical context, flip forward a hundred or so pages to find the full alphabetic entry, then follow a link through to a related term, again many pages away.
Specialised subject thesauri are quite dynamic, expanding in new areas to meet the changing focus of research, and there are major financial and human resource costs incurred in publication, production and distribution in traditional paper format, particularly for larger thesauri, which militate against frequent or regular reissue. We have provided lists of changes to external users of the thesauri, but inevitably there will be logistical problems with the distribution and collation of such updates.
Some customers were asking for thesauri in digital format, so that they could be more fully integrated with, or at least viewed on screen concurrently with the data entry or retrieval process. One option considered was to download individual thesauri into Microsoft Access. Although this would offer greater flexibility to those wishing to integrate a thesaurus into their own systems, its usefulness depended on customers possessing the correct software and an understanding of the complex data structure.
 |
| Figure 1: The Thesaurus Home Page |
It was therefore decided to explore the feasibility of making thesauri available in a format suitable for viewing using a web browser. Dynamic pages composed on request from a database would allow more search capabilities, including wildcard searches (e.g. all terms which contain 'CASTLE'), but could not be distributed independently of the database. As one possible use envisaged for this was distribution on CD, static HTML pages were felt to be more appropriate than dynamically produced pages, and would be faster as well as more portable. It was argued that almost everyone with a computer would have a web browser installed even if they did not have a connection to the Internet, and static pages can be viewed without any specific database product or plug-in.
A suite of programs was developed, based on the same technology as the existing printed reports, using SQR, a highly flexible reporting and data manipulation tool compatible with Oracle and Sybase. Each thesaurus has a unique identifying number. Given this number, the application will produce a full set of pages for that thesaurus. These can be refreshed whenever an updated version is required, and the updated version distributed by CD or uploaded to the Web site.
By using frames, the product allows the user to view the alphabetic entry alongside the class listing, thus putting it into hierarchical context. There is a quick alphabetical index (not included in the printed version), and a 'help' button which explains the abbreviations. All references to broad, narrow, related (etc) terms are hyperlinks, so the entry for a broad term is now only a click away, rather than many pages. On-line customers also have the opportunity to suggest new candidate terms.
 |
| Figure 2: A Thesaurus Entry |
The on-line thesauri were launched at the Weaving the Tapestry conference in September 1998. Initially on the old Royal Commission on Historical Monuments Web site, they have since the merger been transferred to the English Heritage Web site [7] and are available via the knowledge tab.
The following thesauri are currently available.
Monument Types
Contains over 6,000 types of monuments relating to the built and buried heritage in England.
mda Archaeological Objects
Over 2,000 terms relating to physical evidence, usually portable, resulting from past human activity or environmental remains that can be recovered from archaeological fieldwork.
Building Materials
Construction materials for monuments relating to the built and buried heritage, developed in support of the computerisation of the statutory 'Lists' of historic buildings.
Defence of Britain
Types of defensive monuments relating to the 20th century in Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This thesaurus is part of a project to record remaining sites from the two World Wars
Maritime Place Names
Maritime ports, countries and bodies of water from and to which ships may have sailed or been registered. The maritime thesauri support the cataloguing of vessels wrecked on the English coasts.
Maritime Craft Type
Craft types which survive as wrecks for the RCHME’s maritime record and can be used to describe types of ship.
Maritime Cargo
Types of cargo being carried by ships when they went down.
Although the on-line thesauri have not been widely publicised, they are proving one of the most visited parts of the English Heritage Web site and were chosen as a Scout Report Selection in October 1999 [8]. The Scout Report is a weekly publication from the Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison, offering a selection of new and newly discovered Internet resources of interest to researchers and educators. Perhaps more surprisingly, in January 2000 the thesauri were also nominated as Web site of the month by 'Period Living and Traditional Homes', a mass-circulation magazine available from UK supermarket shelves, which perhaps indicates a deeper interest in terminology and the built heritage among the public than has been suspected.
The site is also being used for developing new thesauri. In June 2000, five new thesauri 'in construction' were made available for comment and contribution to heritage professionals via a separate URL [9], and these will be transferred to the 'public' menu in due course when an appropriate level of completeness and consensus has been reached.
Thesauri 'in construction' are as follows:
Timelines
Periods and events relating to the historic heritage
Components
Elements of a monument relating to the built or buried heritage.
Architectural and Cultural Styles
Styles for either cultural or architectural description of monuments or components.
Aircraft
Types of aircraft which survive as wrecks
Maritime Fixtures and Fittings
Objects that are attached to or form part of a maritime craft.
Many customers feel that images would be useful to support the thesaurus text. Although the software is image-ready, English Heritage are currently exploring a number of options and funding avenues to develop an illustrated thesaurus and/or glossary of terms in support of planned developments in disseminating monument information on-line.
English Heritage has helped to promote data standards by offering thesauri in digital form as an alternative to printed output. This has dramatically cut the cost of access to regularly updated terminology resources, and proven popular with both heritage professionals and the public in general.
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Daphne Charles
Web Application Team Leader
NMRC
English Heritage
Swindon
SN2 2GZ
United Kingdom
daphne.charles@rchme.co.uk
<http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/>
Phone: +44 1793 414894
Daphne Charles has a degree in Archaeology and professional computing qualifications. She joined the RCHME (Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England) in 1984 as an analyst-programmer and has been involved with the development of computerised information systems and of data standards in RCHME from their inception. RCHME was merged with English Heritage in 1999.
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For citation purposes:
Charles, D. "In The Beginning Was The Word: Making English Heritage Thesauri Available On-line", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/nmr/>
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By David Green - January 2001
David Green with an overview of the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH), a U.S.-based coalition of more than seventy organizations and institutions (representing libraries, archives, museums, universities, professional societies, publishers and contemporary arts groups) [1] created to ensure strong and informed leadership from the cultural community in the evolution of the digital environment. Part of NINCH’s purpose is to build a framework within which these different elements of the cultural community can collaborate to build an effective networked cultural heritage.
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Although in the early 1990s there were informal discussions among humanities scholars, curators, librarians and information technologists about how to collaborate in an electronic environment, it was the Clinton administration’s 1993 white paper, Agenda for Action, outlining the business and scientific requirements for a “National Information Infrastructure,” that galvanized the formation of NINCH. The white paper made no reference to any cultural agenda, and with no national cultural policy or Ministry of Culture to champion their cause (and in an environment in which the very existence of the National Endowments for the Arts & the Humanities, and even the Department of Education had been threatened), the cultural-educational community felt sidelined [2].
With immediate leadership provided by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS, under President Stanley Katz and Vice President Douglas Bennett), the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI, under Paul Evan Peters and Joan Lippincott, serving librarians and information technologists) and the Getty Art History Information Program (under Eleanor Fink), NINCH was quickly conceptualized as the result of two twinned impulses, the professional (to develop a proactive strategy for integrating the use of computers in the arts and the humanities) and the political (to respond to the government’s challenge to articulate what the cultural sector needed out of the National Information Infrastructure).
ACLS, CNI & the Getty published a report, Humanities & Arts on the Information Superhighway, [3] which included a brief survey of current digital projects and a review of the challenges ahead, and issued a call to other national associations to join the movement. So on gaining sufficient support, NINCH opened its doors in March 1996.
NINCH’s work plan has developed in a fairly consistent way along three principal strategies: building community; creating an advocacy plan; and developing practical programs.
Our first charge was to build, very self-consciously, a sense of identity that would highlight common needs, capabilities and objectives. The chief instrument here was information exchange and education and consisted of:
As we were engaged in this early activity we were caught almost off-guard by the copyright wars and it was our engagement in intellectual property issues that crystallized the nature and character of our coalition, precipitating the statement of our core values.
The chief issue here was “fair use;” the exemption in the U.S. that enables scholars, teachers, critics and others to re-use copyrighted material in certain situations without seeking permission from copyright owners. As Congress prepared to update U.S. Copyright Law in the early 1990s, one green paper (influenced by commercial copyright owners) strongly suggested that in the digital age the “fair use” defense would have to go. A three-year-long process, known as the Conference on Fair Use (CONFU), was established to see whether the principal stakeholders in this issue could forge specific guidelines on fair use that could effectively replace the ambiguous “four factors” used by judges in court [5].
NINCH members do many things with cultural property: they create it, own it, protect, preserve, describe, organize, present, publish, study and teach it. Questions of ownership, guardianship, access, use, potential revenues and theft became hot buttons in the debate over the future of copyright online. While CONFU finally collapsed and attention turned to the fight to keep the fair use exemption in the rewrite of copyright law, NINCH came to a crossroads. Should it become an advocate for the strongest defense of fair use and for particular iterations of a revised copyright law (and thereby lose a few members), or should it create a platform on which debate and learning takes place?
We took the latter course. Emerging from this process it became critical to declare our core values: belief in the arts and humanities as vital to the health of society; belief that a network through which people in all walks of life gain meaningful access to global cultural heritage is a decided public good; and belief that we will advance such a goal through sharing ideas, resources, experience and research among all. Such a “Jeffersonian” call for all to learn from one another as well as the declaration of why this enterprise was so basic to our society proved to be extraordinarily invigorating: a good cornerstone for future growth.
In building our own identity we need also to build bridges to other critically important communities. Chief among these, I believe is information and computer science and technology. Early on in NINCH’s history, we designed a broad initiative, Computer Science and the Humanities, with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Academies. This was launched in 1997 with a very productive roundtable discussion among computer scientists, humanities practitioners, funders and administrators that I’ll return to later in this paper.
In our first three years, we managed to create a space or framework that didn’t exist before. On this framework, the different parts of our community (the museums, archives, arts groups, libraries, scholars and others) can understand the broader landscape in which they operate. As one NINCH member put it: "NINCH has helped focus attention on the wide range of institutions that share common concerns and this visibility has helped us understand our own issues, others’ issues, and the wider context in which we operate."
The key to advocacy is vision. Part of the process of building an understanding of our common enterprise was developing a vision of what networked cultural heritage would look like.
What we envision is a sophisticated, dynamically integrated, digital exploratorium; a virtual, distributed collection of cultural heritage material that will enable an individual or team to create, enjoy or work with digital objects of all kinds, in all media. Widely accessible, easily usable and deeply searchable, by creators, scholars, the general public and by teachers and learners of all ages across the global information infrastructure, it will be of the highest possible quality and fidelity and be able to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of each digital object. It will enable new kinds of exploration, discovery and knowledge—about objects, cultures and ourselves. It will be a new kind of place — a library, a text, sound and moving-image archive, a museum, and a studio. The materials available will be incredibly diverse, ranging from prehistoric artifacts to digital immersive theater and new narrative forms; from medieval manuscripts and 1930s newsreels to virtual multi-dimensional, multimedia tours of medieval cathedrals, ancient archeological sites and cities as they age and grow through time. There might even be books.
The next step is to translate the vision: to educate ourselves, policymakers, and the public about the critical importance of our vision and about the challenges involved in achieving it. Our copyright experience taught us that advocacy would be an educational, not a legislative or hectoring activity [6]. And we believe we’ve had success in enabling members, sometimes with apparently entrenched positions, to understand a larger picture and realize that we’re all in this together.
Intellectual property issues clearly prevent our vision from becoming a reality. CONFU taught us that our community still needed a grounding in copyright basics. We joined others in organizing a series of Copyright Town Meetings in 1996-1997 to talk about these issues, bringing in legal experts and other practitioners and opening the floor to questions and debate.
The town meetings proved useful and popular. Recognizing that copyright issues will get increasingly complex and will directly involve more of us (artists, administrators, curators, teachers, students, faculty, and the public), we are committed to continuing copyright education in several forms, including the town meetings.
Beyond copyright, we are building our capacity to influence public policy (including widening funding streams) by developing a greater capacity to understand and articulate our needs and achievements. One early step was our collecting “Best Examples” [7] of the community’s achievements to date and the best arguments about the value of this work. We are also building a capacity to prepare white papers on key issues to educate our members and policymakers
A longer-term goal is to apply advanced web-based technology to map in multi-dimensional forms the activity and achievements of the cultural heritage community in networking materials. We are also considering forms of graphical representation of the concepts and issues we advocate. What would a resource-rich information environment look like?
As a result of our community-building and advocacy efforts, we have now assembled a program for action that we believe responds to urgent current needs and explores new models for social, economic and technical solutions to the problems of effectively networking cultural heritage. Each of these programs depends on a NINCH working group for its progress and development. Indeed most of our work is accomplished through its staff working with members organized into working groups. Groups either accomplish their assigned tasks themselves or create a funding proposals for work to be done by member organizations or other consultants. All working groups are authorized by the board; they report periodically to the board and all of their recommendations are considered for approval by the board.
Arts and humanities computing has since its inception been hampered by the lack of an adequate means for collecting and publishing information about activity in the field. Its interdisciplinary scope and methodological nature, coupled with rapid technological change, have so far thwarted the development of a practical bibliography of ongoing work. The lack of such a tool has been repeatedly and urgently noted by researchers, administrators and funding agencies, all of whom need to know what work is being done by whom and how it can be used by others.
A NINCH working group and an advisory group, which include many directors of humanities computing centers on university campuses in the U.S. and abroad, is designing and constructing an international distributed database of digital humanities projects whose goal is to provide regularly updated, peer-reviewed "deep data" on current projects and works in progress. It has been designed primarily for those creating digital resources so that they can avoid duplication of effort, be encouraged to collaborate and share information on methodology and software and to serve as an information and policy-building resource for funders. We've designed a Dublin Core-based database structure; the National Endowment for the Humanities has delivered 110 records of digital projects it has funded over the past three years; and the University of Michigan and Rice University have each donated catalogers and library staff to produce a working prototype.
As many cultural and educational institutions (and also many individual faculty) go about digitizing material for teaching, research, and even preservation, what ground rules do they have, what questions do they ask themselves, which information and technical standards are they aware of? How can those working in museums, libraries, archives, arts institutions, universities, colleges, or in their own studies or studios learn from others working in different sectors? How can they break institutional barriers in thinking through the wide range of potential uses and users of their materials?
These and other questions were behind the formation, in January 1999, of the NINCH Working Group on Best Practices to produce a Guide to Good Practice, taking advantage of the wide-ranging expertise represented in NINCH membership of all types of cultural resources from all kinds of cultural institutions. The Working Group agreed on an approach emphasizing community-wide guiding principles for the creation, capture and management of networked resources combined with "hands-on" expertise developed in exemplary practice and projects. They agreed that there is also a need for a map of where the lacunae are: areas for which good practice still needs to be developed, assessed and documented.
Thus the working group drew up a set of core principles that it believed should govern the creation of digital cultural heritage resources. Good practice would thus:
After issuing an RFP, the working group contracted with the Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute (HATII) of the University of Glasgow. The HATII team will conduct a survey of the field to discover and define exemplary practice and write the Guide, under the direction of, and in close cooperation with, the NINCH Working Group. The survey will include interviews with practitioners and reviews of published guidelines and projects that demonstrate good practice.
The NINCH Guide will be a significantly different kind of publication than any that currently exists. First it will cut across all types of material, all sectors of the cultural community, all academic disciplines and all institution types. It is designed to be a unifying guide with a primary focus on resource types (text, images, moving images, etc.). Second, it will be based on an extensive survey of current practice in order to create a rich knowledge base of success and failure of different approaches. Third, it will be an eminently practical guide, a handbook for practitioners "at the coal face." Working Group and consultants agree that a Socratic decision-tree structure will be an essential navigational device of this Guide. It will ask a practitioner with a given resource a set of questions at each decision point in the long process of digitizing and managing cultural resources, guiding them through the process and pointing to the best available set of tools that currently exist to help in the decisions that have to be taken.
NINCH is collaborating with the Council on Library & Information Resources (CLIR) in organizing a small invitational conference (February 15-16, 2001) for 40 leaders in the library, museum, business, higher education, and legal communities to examine new business models emerging as museums and libraries, separately and together, assemble digital, online collections. The conference builds on "Collections, Content & the Web," organized by CLIR with the Chicago Historical Society in October 1999 to discuss issues relating to museums and libraries online [9].
Six directors will discuss the history and evolution of their institutions/projects, focusing on the business models adopted and the special challenges they face. Examples will include JSTOR, Highwire Press, Questia, the partnership between the George Eastman House and the International Center for Photography, the Art Museum Network and Fathom.com. Other institutional/project directors, as well as legal, financial and technical experts will then respond to the presentations. Moderated discussion on the second day will then examine how considerations about sustainability affect critical decisions about: what is put online and for whom; how to manage rights when providing access to and preserving digital assets; what technological opportunities and constraints are confronted; how to market the services to potential investors and users; how to gain support from the home institutional governing bodies; and what impacts these decisions have on institutional staffing and budget.
There will be a published report on the conversations and the most promising models. We expect to pursue the development of a research agenda that will stimulate practical collaborative projects and outline what information and research is still needed. We see this as a companion project both to our "Guide to Good Practice" (what makes a good business plan? what effect will certain decisions have?) and to our Computer Science & the Humanities projects.
With a knowledge of who is doing what; of what the best practices are in networking cultural heritage; and of how copyright can help (or hinder) us in broadening access to that heritage, perhaps the greatest problem we have to face, as we create a networked cultural heritage, is determining the longer-term needs of the cultural community. How do we go about developing the digital tools--the software and the environments--that are shaped by, and respond to, the ways of working and the ways of thinking of those engaged in creating, preserving, researching and teaching cultural resources?
Recognizing that early applications of computing technology were driven by business and technical needs, we are increasingly aware that newer kinds of applications arising in the arts and humanities create and use knowledge in different ways than conventional applications. Although some conventional technology may transfer well to the arts and humanities, we are at the point where it makes sense to develop technology that serves those needs better and more explicitly.
With the 1997 Roundtable on Computer Science and the Humanities organized with the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), we established the ground for research into how computer scientists and humanists could work together for their mutual benefit. William Wulf, President of the National Academy of Engineering and co-chair of the 1997 Roundtable, has since testified in Congress that the humanities will present the biggest and best problems for computer science and information technology into this new century.
Humanists need to take the lead to guarantee that intellectual needs shape technical solutions. However, the first step is to articulate those needs in order to form the basis for generative collaboration with computer and information scientists and technologists. Building Blocks was the first component of the Computer Science and Humanities Initiative. Funded by the Rockefeller, Delmas and National Science Foundations, NINCH worked with the representatives of 26 scholarly and professional societies to bring together 90 humanists organized into five fields (History, Interdisciplinary Studies, Language & Literature, Performing Arts, and Visual & Media Studies) . The three main objectives of the workshop (held September 20-24, 2000) were:
1.How We Work: to review and critically evaluate, by field, current scholarly and pedagogical practice, with particular attention to the use of primary source materials (using the 250 returns to a questionnaire, "Working With Materials,");
2.What Do We Need: to articulate by field and across disciplines the most pressing needs in the humanities that networked computing could address;
3.Where Do We Go From Here? to outline short-term, practical, collaborative projects; and to outline areas to be potentially included on a longer-term research agenda to be developed with computer scientists.
The format of the meeting interwove three panel presentations of topical issues (Possibilities of Digital Media; New Models of Publication/Dissemination; Interactivity & Visualization); cross-disciplinary discussions of the implications of the presentations; and discipline-based discussions.
For many, the core of the meeting was the set of intensive discussions in discipline-based "field meetings," where the state and needs of a given field were debated by scholars and teachers alongside librarians, archivists, curators, publishers and others. Participants, selected by representatives of societies and displaying a great diversity of backgrounds and approaches, discovered both fruitful similarities (common values and methodologies that became firm foundations for creating short-term project proposals) and differences (the value of particular expertise and specialties) that served to energize the process.
The workshop was an extraordinary success. In the words of just one of many enthusiastic testimonials to the quality of conversation and achieved results: "This was one of the most invigorating and worthwhile workshops I've ever been part of....Every other participant I spoke with agreed that it was a truly significant gathering for the humanities and for scholarship online.” More than 20 project proposals are now being developed (from drafts produced at the meeting). Each project has its own team (typically a university-based center, a number of scholarly societies and selected consultants) that is developing the proposal to be submitted by a lead team-member, under the aegis of the Building Blocks Steering Committee.
Beyond the "short-term" (projects to be developed in the next 2-4 years), the workshop participants made first iterations of statements of the issues and problems that needed to be further developed, over the long term, with computer scientists. The most likely forum for the creation and implementation of this research agenda will be a series of three annual conferences on Computer Science & the Humanities to begin in the fall of 2001 [10].
This conference series, funded by the Carnegie Corporation, will convene distinguished achievers in humanities computing with computer scientists, funders and policymakers. Best examples of recent work will be presented alongside many varied opportunities to extend the conversations of the 1997 Roundtable.
The conference will allow participants to demonstrate exemplary applications of technology in the humanities and relevant applications in the computer sciences; to link discussions between disciplines; and generally to create new opportunities for peer learning from a variety of formats, including formal presentations, project reviews, and interactive sessions focusing on new tools. Using these means, the goals of the conference series will include:
This is the current range and ambition of our developing coalition. The lessons we are learning might be reduced to the following guidelines for ourselves and for others outside the coalition:
Finally, congruent with NINCH’s Core Values statement is the assertion that the computer and networking systems are clearly tools to be used for a greater end. Children of Marshall McLuhan, we understand that these tools act as extensions of our own nervous system and can radically modify our perceptions, but it is still critical to emphasize that these digital tools are only our instruments and need constant re-invention and re-thinking, according to our own statement of needs. The cultural community needs to be setting the agendas: intellectual needs must shape technical solutions.
did contain a chapter on "Arts, Humanities and Culture on the
NII, URL: <http://nii.nist.gov/pubs/sp868/arts.html>
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David L. Green
Executive Director
National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage
21 Dupont Circle, NW
Washington DC 20036
david@ninch.org
<http://www.ninch.org>
Phone: 202/296-5346
Fax: 202/872-0886
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For citation purposes:
Green, D. L. "The National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage: Intellectual Needs Shaping Technical Solutions", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/ninch/>
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By Franz Fischnaller - January 2001
We are at a particularly revolutionary moment in history. Digital media is influencing the arts and shaping the way of culture. It is giving form to new artistic languages, revolutionising composition, the treatment of images, the concept of 'perspective' and the perception of space. The act of creation and the production processes of the author are suffering radical changes. Possibilities to experience the intangible are increasing. The invisible takes form.
There is a revolution in the relationship between 'art' and the artist, as well as the mode of perception and the fruition of the visitor in relation to a digital piece. This means new forms of perceiving, of communicating, of informing, of reacting, of sharing, of distraction, of thinking, of projecting, and of creating.
Franz Fischnaller expounds on this virtual revolution. He compares Virtual Reality's origins with those of the Cinematography Industry and contemplates whether it too will become an established technology.
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Countries with a rich cultural heritage, such as those in the Mediterranean are amongst the more fortunate when it comes to consideration of achievements in the fields of architecture, art, science, and literature. There are enormous possibilities for marketing, commercialisation and income generation from the organisation and management of these historic resources with the aid of the new technology.
F.A.B.R.I.CATORS [1], an interdisciplinary group concerned with the integration of technology, communication, art and design, strongly believe that the integration of the existing cultural patrimony with digital arts and new technological systems can produce an intense marriage. This integration could create an interesting, evolutionary and above all productive blending that could give rise to a new tendency in the fields of art, science, culture, and the economy.
There are some countries which have succeeded in organising and managing their cultural patrimony, based on tradition and some innovation; and some cities which have resolved many economic and social issues by making their cultural heritage a source of income and one of constant growth in many ways. The Italian cities, for example, rich in cultural patrimony, continue to manage these treasures almost exclusively under the traditional umbrella of tourism, failing to take advantage of the many possibilities that the new technologies could provide in managing a 'new' type of tourism, based on the existing cultural patrimony. The reasons and factors are various. However one of the main causes that the system has not been able to, or does not want to grasp or understand adequately are the capacities and potentialities of the digital media, and how through this technological tool it could recuperate its dynamism in the arts. In general terms it could be observed that there is not enough projection toward the present or the future and not enough renovation in the use and approach of the information.
It would appear that in general the Italian approach is not able to manage this amount of potential treasure in an up to date way by exploiting the potential the new technology can provide in the field of education, information, culture and the arts. Likewise, in the potential creation of new tendencies and new market, of production and of commercialisation. As far as we know, in practical terms, there is no concrete and continuous specific plan of action in the field of art, museum management, cultural heritage, nor in the use of digital media. There is no continuity of plans and therefore there is difficulty in maintaining a concrete program with clear objectives and results. Even when a plan of action exists in theory, it is far from being a practical solution and even if there are excellent ideas, they rarely become a real praxis with clear objectives and results.
Despite the general situation, there are labs, organisations, individuals, societies, groups, movements, and events that are working in a positive direction, and it is most important to integrate these resources in order to create a concrete tendency.
Some of the Italian municipalities are making decisions and organising events, which generate new situations. The office of High Technology for official entities of Tuscany is one of the municipalities working in this direction. The eventsit has organised include 'Virtuality and Interactivity' [2], an International exhibition of Multimedia Art and applied research from Mediartech (Digital Renaissance). It is a yearly international multimedia show dedicated to cultural heritage, the arts, and the performing arts.
Franz Fischnaller, the curator of this show says: "It is within my objectives to bring the new media into the awareness of the common individual as well as the professional. Education, information, culture and art are the main priorities of 'Virtuality and Interactivity' thus an important goal is to extend the knowledge of the new media in different skill levels of society, from students to professionals, to people who are simply fascinated by what is taking place.....Similarly, our goals are to stimulate interest, to increase awareness of this new reality, to stimulate the field of cultural patrimony, to use and integrate high technology, to contribute to the evolutionary process of the media and culture, to establish a dynamic interaction within the public, and to inform on what is taking place in the areas of research, development, production, and application of digital media."
Virtual Reality (VR) and the digital media are influencing diverse disciplines. We can see more active application and development in the fields of medicine, industry, architecture, and science however much less is observed in the fields of arts, culture and the cinema. Why? Many factors are currently stopping VR from becoming a real entertainment or EDU entertainment technology, like the art form of the cinema.
These factors will have to be taken into consideration:
In most countries you will find a vast number of theatres, cinemas, etc. There are several in each city and literally thousands in some countries. This allows for the presentation and projection of that specific art form. There exist many excellent books in the world, there are also many mediocre ones and even more rubbish ones. The same situation exists in the cinema. The quantity of movies the cinematography industry presents nowadays is on the increase. Films are produced of excellent, good, regular and poor quality. This is possible because established technology exists which evolves and which is possible to work with, on diverse bases, but its not the case for VR.
One of the major problems is there is no established industry for VR for the general public. It has been kept at quite a reduced level. VR has yet to pass through the experimentation and exploitation process that the cinema has gone through when pioneers investing in technology explore its potentialities.
Another of the major problems is that there is a lack of content and production. Many authors fail to take into account, or are unable to understand that VR has to have a story as well and that a VR application has to somehow involve the public. This is not only because it's a great technology with stereo immersion, navigation, and interaction but because of its content and narrative or virtual narrative. There is still a lot to be done.
We expect that the critic, industrialist, businessman, historian, manager, authors, producers, artists and creative people generally, will grasp the importance and the magnitude of this revolution and contribute in solving the basic problems inherent to it. We need great investors, with economic means and visionaries in the digital field to place this media within a cultural and commercial framework. Whoever accomplishes this task will have achieved a truly outstanding feat and created an historical landmark.
At this point it is interesting to remember certain facts. Towards the end of the nineteenth century what was known as the Edison Kinescope Box was installed in many places of diversion. The boxes contained a series of coils that permitted the individual viewing of a movie. Edison himself refused to project the picture on a screen because he thought that the people would have no interest in viewing such a spectacle.
Officially, this novelty came into existence on the 28th of December, 1895. The Lumiere brothers made a public demonstration of their film to the spectators in the Indian Saloon of Paris. The public were very impressed with their first viewing of a film entitled 'The arrival of a train to the Ciotat station'. The effect of the locomotive, which appeared to run out of the screen, was astounding. It was the birth of cinematography. Afterwards movies were produced based on daily life and working conditions with limited content and creativity. The initial exit and impact of this novelty slowly faded into oblivion. The public started becoming bored and tired.
It seems more than likely that the Lumiere brothers were unable to fully comprehend the potential and the versatility of the technology they had invented. It was probably beyond their wildest imagination that the cinematography they presented to the public that day would grow into such a successful industry, as it became later in the United States. Then, when it took another turn with an explosion of super productions, the Lumieres´ reacted and challenged legally, this new outbreak which was termed "The battle of the Patents". After this, some of the producers went to California where the land and the living were cheap, and the possibilities of establishing themselves were better and so started the industry of Hollywood as we know today.
But let's go back in time to that instant when the interest of the public started declining! It was at that key moment in the history of the cinema that Georges Melies entered the scene. Georges Melies had capacity and used the new technology available with creativity. Melies was able to make the dreams of the people reality by showing them images of other realities on the screen. At last, the fantasy could fly through the projected light. Melies is the first inventor of cinematographical fictions; or better yet of science fictions with 'Trip to the Moon' (1902) and 'A Trip through the Impossible' (1904). They are found among the better examples of the inventor of trickery. To a certain extent the excellent productions of Melies recaptured the interest of the public and kept them stimulated. Could it be that Melies in that crucial passage helped to save the cinema from dying?
It is interesting to observe that with Virtual Reality the concept of the optic, movement and that of the camera view, have undergoing revolutionary changes. In Virtual pieces the visitor becomes the 'camera'. The cinema started out with a fixed camera. The Lumiere brothers placed a Tele-camera at a fixed point and filmed all that took place before it. It was a fixed scene of an object or a person in movement.
Possibly, the constant use of this solution was one of the determinant factors that contributed to the monotony of the cinema? After a certain period, they moved on to a more dynamic solution: the camera became movable and in consequence they integrated movement into the process of filming, which meant that the perspective of the scenes and the cinematography object became part of this movement.
In this way, the camera and its movements became closer to the nature of the human eye, permitting greater dynamism to the films and in consequence, the emotive level, the psychology and the resources of the cinema became more intensified. This change required more work to be undertaken of fundamental aspects of filming such as that of the illumination, the composition of the scene, the actors, the story, the ambiences.
The cinema defined and concretised a specific language consisting of: its codes, its communicational system and its technique of language. They created a method, which the authors use for carrying out their work until this day, and depending upon the innovations introduced, these are adapted to the system or scheme already in existence.
The movie was, and still is, seen by a public seated in front of a projection and a screen. The relation, body space and temporary time, is very well defined and delineated. It is a passive system. The intensity has to be developed on an emotive level, both mentally and psychologically. In this sense, VR is revolutionary. The visitor can intervene in the first person. The visitor is interactive. He or she can become a very flexible camera. It is the visitor who decides in to which of the scenes they want to enter, or what perspective they want to observe, if they wants to fly, to walk, to go up or down, to turn around in 360 degrees, or to penetrate the image.
There is a different style of perception between the world of the image and the action of the visitor. The parameters that define the relationship between the work and the psyche, of the author and of the public, have changed. On the other hand the tri-dimensional aspect, the scenes and the tri-dimensional stereo images give unlimited possibilities in VR, in relation to the interpretation of the image and its perception.
If we were to stop and reflect on the depth of field that the cinema has been exploiting with the use of bi-dimensional images, we would do well to imagine what things we could accomplish, with a technique that permits action in a range of 360 degrees. Add to this the magic of the tri-dimensional stereo and the concept in the field of human precision and the profundity of the field is exalted to unimaginable power. It is important to be able to generate a high emotive level in the public and make them experiment in this revolution in a way in which was not possible to experiment with other media. However much still depends upon the originality and the quality of the author, the ambience, the theme, the aesthetics of the content, the interactive elements, the music etc. There are still some authors who work with Virtual Reality as if it were one of the traditional systems.
It is true that in VR lineal sequences, like those in the cinema, do not necessarily exist. There is to a certain extent a rupture in the classical system. The centre becomes fragmented because each one of the parts is part of the centre. The sequences can be pre-established by the author of the virtual work, but the visitor decides where and how to go. And this the author should always bear in mind. In VR the sequences are not necessarily connected to a unique pathway, but the scenes can be united to a unique body. Within these scenes, things happen, actions and consequences that the visitor could bring about with his/her own intervention.
This new digital media offer us a new aperture. It raises many questions: How do we communicate this story through the means of a new language, new codes, other new parameters and new media, after being accustomed to the traditional systems, that are quite different from this new one? The fragmentation of those traditional systems radically stimulates human thought. For creating, working and producing.
Of course it is much more complex to create under these terms because there is need to think in a more abstract and less figurative and lineal way. In consequence, the creation process suffers an evolution specifically in relation to the concept of 'space time' that we are accustomed to see, experience, create and produce. This specific, new element is part of evolution, within the revolution of the media. It is an evolution in intellectual terms, not intellectual in relation to theory but intellectual in relation to the intellect of the idea, to the essence of human thought.
F.A.B.R.I.CATORS produces VR applications, simulations, interactive installations, animation projects and interactive spaces. It also organises and runs exhibitions and digital events. One of the main objectives of F.A.B.R.I.CATORS is to demonstrate ways in which VR can be used to the benefit of companies, and give innovative solutions for product presentation purposes; original marketing solutions, realisation of innovative applications, digital prototypes, virtual environments, simulations etc.
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F.A.B.R.I.CATORS gives primary attention to the efficiency of the technology, the creativity of the interface, the quality and fantasy of the content, the graphics, the integration between functionality and fantasy and general aesthetics. The group is comprised of an interdisciplinary group of professionals (in house and consultants). The team follows a defined group method: flexible and highly creative, open to a continuous process of renewal, which permits the process of problem solving in an effective way, adopting innovative solutions.
One of the main aims of F.A.B.R.I.CATORS is to devise contemporary ways of creation and communication that combine art and technology in an effective manner. They do so in the design and production of projects, interactive art pieces, VR installations and creative interfaces. To work on the basis of the integration of multidisciplinary expressions and disciplines, such as: art, culture, technology, architecture, design, using the creative system 'Uptodates'.
F.A.B.R.I.CATORS has a keen interest in retaining its own style in a production by giving priority to originality, the intensity of the interaction, the aesthetics and the quality of the content. As well as giving importance to the design of ambience, the light, the concept of perspective, of space, of atmosphere, the texture and skin of the world, and the intensity of the interaction. It is of great importance to bring out the content to its fullest expression.
It is not always easy to resist the temptation of falling into a process of rapidity and easiness resulting in a consequent deficiency in quality caused by several limiting factors; such as too little a time for production, lack of adequate financial resources and others. F.A.B.R.I.CATORS are of the opinion that VR in the cultural sector, in design, artistic and in entertainment has not been fully explored. Production should not be limited to cultural events, entertainment, industry and science, but should penetrate the barriers and also get into the areas of documentary, journalism and ecology in a more consistent way. VR could be utilised and exploited and become a sophisticated tool in cultivating a fair level of consciousness in the general public.
F.A.B.R.I.CATORS main office is located in Milan, Italy. From January 2001 the group will be extending to North and South America whilst retaining the nucleus base in Milan, Italy.
F.A.B.R.I.CATORS have produced numerous titles, a selection are given below. Other titles such as Robot Avatars and CICOV Centro Interactivo can be seen on the Web site [3].
Pinocchio Interactive is a dynamic installation, which integrates robotic, animation, digital fantasy and interactivity. The installation comprises of a real stylised robot, Pinocchio Puppet, who is 1.8 meters tall and made out of wood and metal. Pinocchio Puppet acts in the middle of the scenery, between the digital world projected on the screen that forms the scenery and the interactive visitor.
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An interactive script has been written based on the original story of Pinocchio. The visitor slips into each of the digital chapters through the Pinocchio Puppet whilst interacting in real time with the digital world contained in the chapters. The literary Pinocchio becomes a virtual personage and the story, the people the adventures, the ambiences where the action takes place are digital worlds which it is possible to navigate and interact with. It is like opening a book of Pinocchio stories and slipping into a tri-dimensional world.
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| Figure 1: The set up of Pinocchio Interactive |
Multimega Book (MMB) in the Cave was the winner of the Foreign Title Award in the Theater and Exhibition Section at Multimedia Grand Prix 1997. The application is primarily designed to run in the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE); a VR full-inmersive-interactive installation with high-resolution stereoscopic images. This multi-person, room-sized VR system was developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), University of Illinois at Chicago. It is however, capable of running on a number of different VR platforms, including the Immersa-Desk and simpler graphics workstations.
The user experiences, and creatively interacts with two revolutionary moments in human history and experiences the shift between the printed communication (XV century) and electronic communication (XX century); the Renaissance and the Electronic Age are integrated into one unique environment. The application juxtaposes two revolutions, which have transformed the history of communication and in consequence human history.
The navigation and the interaction of the Multi-Mega-Book is often surprising, it is designed to draw the user from the Renaissance to the Information Age, exploring two different modes of communication and showing how both eras combine mathematics, innovation, art and cutting edge technology. In its entirety, the MMB is a metaphor for means of communication through time. The different pages of the MMB-installation give access to different aspects of the history of communication.
"I touch one of the Maxi/Pages and it collapses into a 3D environment ....Suddenly I am inside a classical city which surrounds me on every side. Buildings, streets, squares, arches, corners, sculptures, objects, paintings of the epoch of the Renaissance. Pieces by artists of the calibre of Michelangelo, Albert, Botticelli, Leonard da Vinci, Brunneleschi are painted like murals onto the walls of buildings and become protagonists in this imaginary city which contains such buildings as: Santa Maria delle Grazie, Santa Maria del Fiore, Uffizzi, Piazza Innocenti, Palazzo Pitti, the Laurenziana, etc."
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The user can also visit and penetrate Leonardo famous masterpiece The Last Supper and use and interact with Gutenberg's printing press. They can also travel through a cyber tunnel which leads into the CD-City, a cyber city that visualises the movement of digital and networked information.
Kali was produced ad hoc, for the Berliner Festspiele GmbH in Germany, for the exhibition Seven Hills - Images and Signs of the 21st Century. The show opened from the 14th of May to the 29th of October 2000 in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin/Germany.
Two diverse, versions have been produced of Kali. The first version integrates an interactive sculpture and three-screen projection. The second version, the VR application, can be visualised through different interactive platforms, such as Cave, Visionarium, and V-Desk, or simply by using a workstation and a large screen.
For the VR production Division of Parametric, Softimage, 3D Studio and PhotoShop were used. For the Video-interactive Premiere and Macromedia with Pinnacle in Mpeg2 were used. Specific Plug-ins for the integration of the Video-interactive and VR were written and the eyes of Kali's sculpture were adapted with Crystal eyes to allow stereoscopic vision. The application can run on a SGI platform as well as NT Workstations. Kali is a very rich application in VR as well as in video interaction. It is possible to make it run in NT by using an extremely good frame rate. (About 25). This was resolved by designing the VR model with a specific, esthetical approach, keeping really high quality of the content and assembling specific hardware and writing Plug-ins.
The sensors integrated in Kali’s neck allow the visitor to interact and navigate with Kali's VR-environment and the Video Interactive in a very friendly way. The sensor is an aluminum cylindrical structure embedding one IR pulsed transmitter, one receiver, and a blue LED; When a finger is placed close to the sensor, IR beams are reflected and detected by receiver. Data collected by all these elements are elaborated by a microprocessor-based circuit and sent through serial communication line to Computer-hosting VR rendered.
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"Kali emerges like an enigma, with her four winding arms, her body naked, a dark intense blue and her eyes illuminated by virtual spaces. Oriental melodies, sounds, music, slip from her body saturating the entire space. Kali's interactive sculpture is 2mts in height and stands on the top of a hill, immersed in a play of shadows. A retro projection screen lays on her right foot. Two retro projection screens of 3mts x 2.25mts are placed onto Kali's right and left sides."
The visitor approaches Kali by walking up three steps and laying their face against hers, looking through her eyes and interacting and navigating with the sensors integrated in her neck. Kali's content is articulated by Kali's inner world, the virtual world, the world of causes and decision making. Kali's external world is the world of effects, generated by the person who is interacting within the virtual worlds.
Kali's virtual world goes beyond the scope of traditional VR applications. It's an interactive passage between the real and the imaginary, orient and occident, cosmos and earth, nature and city cause and effect. A compendium of forms and content of mythical elements and ancestral memories integrated into the digital era. It contains themes such as history, mythology, nature, city, chaos, equilibrium, and evolution ... establishing a sort of active pathway between the orient and occident ... the era of the myth and that of the electronic. The visitor can interact from 5 to 35 minutes.
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| Figure 2: The set up of Kali |
A VR interactive journey into the Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece: L'Ultima Cena, The last Supper. This virtual application is a powerful tool that allows users to understand the relationship between the real architecture of the refettorio and the painted architecture by Leonardo. Approaching the Ultima Cena you discover the beauty and the details of this masterpiece. The painting can be observed from 6 metres away or from a very close viewpoint, enjoying the details and navigating through it. Leonardo's masterpiece can be considered as an outstanding example of the renaissance synthesis between art and science: the mathematics of geometric constructions was then well established and known to scientist as well as art people. The computer based perspective representation is the final result of the continuing growing knowledge during the centuries in geometry and mathematics, which allows us now to compute accurately the numerical parameters of the ancient constructive methods.
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"Far on the horizon I recognise a famous renaissance church and monastery: Santa Maria delle Grazie, built in the 1500's in Milan and partly attributed to Brunnelleschi. Inside the monastery, in the refettorio, Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Ultima Cena. I go towards it and look around the building, enjoy the facade and the aerial view. Then I pass through the wall: the inner architectural structure of the church raises gradually in red wire-frame lines, and after few seconds, the space is filled by the complete structure rendered in a red line drawing. I navigate within the columns, arcades and vaults and I get a real feeling of the volume and space of this church". The overlay of the Theorem in the original viewpoint demonstrates the exact position of the perspective composition. The computer programs construct the homogeneous co-ordinates represented in the painted space, perform the linear transformation in the perspective space, and produce the final projection on the visualisation plane, in Cartesian co-ordinates, of the three dimensional scene imagined by Leonardo.
Tracking the Net is a powerful VR and Motion Capture installation and a collective interactive installation. More than 10 users can interact in real time and the interaction between the subjects and the Net are identified by a motion capture system.
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Visitors can freely interact and navigate within the virtual environments by touching, pulling, and stretching the Net. They have to use their hands and body to get real time visual and acoustical feedback from the VR system. Cameras detect position of small infrared beam reflectors placed on different points of the elastic ropes. A computer-based process generates real-time 3D positional information about reflectors, and issue commands to another computer, which hosts VR software. Two installations, placed in different areas, even into non-local spaces, can be connected together. Tracking the Net has been designed to host interactive teams and for different applications in fields such as cultural, architectural, design, artistic, games, physical rehabilitation and research. Applications in the medical area have been identified with particular reference to physical rehabilitation and its connections with psychology. The structure can be modified both electronically and mechanically and also the content can be specifically developed and produced in accordance with requested typology of use, navigation and interactions.
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| Figure 3: The set up of Tracking the Net |
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Franz Fischnaller
F.A.B.R.I.CATORS
Via Fratelli Bronzetti 6
20129 Milano
Italy
fabricat@galactica.it
franz@evl.uic.edu
URL: <http://www.fabricat.com/>
URL: <http://www.evl.uic.edu/>
Phone: (0039) 02 70128233
Fax: 02 76110498
Franz Fischnaller was the co-founder of F.A.B.R.I.CATORS and is now the art and production Director. He is a Professor at the Università degli Studi di Firenze (University of Florence, Italy), and teaches art and multimedia on the Master of Multimedia of Florence (Italy), supported by the RAI, the national Italian TV organisation. He is also Professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.
Franz was the Director of 'Virtuality and Interactivity', the International Exhibit of Multimedia Art and Applied research of Mediartech (Digital Renaissance). Mediartech is a yearly international multimedia show dedicated to cultural heritage, the arts and performing arts promoted by the region of Tuscany/Italy and organised by the Tuscany Hi Tech Network. He is also the designer and Project Co-ordinator of a new Interactive art centre in Cordoba, Spain called CICOV (Centro Interactivo Cordoba Virtual).
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For citation purposes:
Fischnaller, F. "The Virtual Revolution", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/fabricators/>
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By Brian Kelly - January 2001
You are about to give a presentation about your project at a prestigious international conference. You have prepared the material. You are an experienced speaker. Surely nothing can go wrong. Or can it? Brian Kelly provides advice on the technical aspects of giving presentations.
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We've probably all attended conferences when something has gone wrong. The PC crashes, the projection system fails to work, the Netscape display is too small, etc. This can be embarrassing to watch; but the experience can be much worse if you are the speaker.
This article provides advice on how to avoid disasters happening. The article concentrates on the technical aspects of speaking at conferences - dealing with stage fright, heckling, etc. are, I am afraid, out of scope of this article.
Microsoft PowerPoint is the de facto desktop presentation tool used at conferences. It is simple to use, widely available and, since so many people use it, there should always be a ready supply of advice available if things go wrong.
On the other hand, there is the danger that conference delegates may be becoming bored with endless PowerPoint presentations: not only with poorly designed presentations which make use of cliched clip art, overuse visual and sounds effects, etc. but also with the slick presentations produced by many marketing departments.
The following advice is not meant to suggest that PowerPoint must be used - rather it provides guidelines on using PowerPoint effectively if you do decide to use it.
The secret to avoiding things going wrong when giving your PowerPoint presentation is in the planning. To ensure that your slides can be read to everyone in the audience you should ensure that your slides contain legible text for the headings and body text and that the background is not distracting. You may have a template which is used within your organisation or for your project which defines the look-and-feel of the slides. A properly designed template should help to avoid mistakes which many first time presenters make (such as overuse of visual effects and clip art). A skilled graphic designer should also be able to advise on colour schemes which do not cause problems for viewers suffering from colour blindness.
An example of the template used by UKOLN is illustrated in Figure 1.
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| Figure 1: Example of a PowerPoint Template |
This template has a simple appearance, which includes UKOLN's logo. The slide headings are displayed in UKOLN's house colour, which provides additional branding. Text is displayed in an Arial (Helvetica) font - this sans-serif font is well-suited for displays (although not for sustained reading). We use 44 point for the slide title and 24 point for body text (the size of the body text can decrease slightly, but should not go below 20 point).
The template also contains a slide number, which is displayed in a small font. This can be useful in enabling the speaker to go directly to a slide instead of having to work through slides in sequence.
Another author's aid which can be used is the unobtrusive circle at the top right of slides. This can be used as an aide memoire for the speaker - a grey circle act as a reminder that the end of a theme has been reached ("we've now concluded our discussion on X, and if there are no questions we can move on to Y"). Additional reminders can be included: for example a D in the circle is sometimes used to indicate that a demonstration can be given. If you want, you could include a smiley face :-) to remind you to tell a joke!
The UKOLN template is accompanied by a brief set of guidelines [1]. This gives further information on how the template should be used, on capturing graphics, etc.
Inserting a blank page at the end of a presentation can help to avoid your presentation suddenly leaving the PowerPoint viewer and returning to PowerPoint if you try to move past the final slide. This can be done using the Tools, Options, View, End with black slide option.
Many PowerPoint presentations will contain graphics, such as screen dumps of Web sites. When capturing screen dumps of Web browsers you should:
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| Figure 2: Configuring The Netscape Browser |
Speakers will probably find it useful to print out the thumbnail images of the slides. This can be a useful aide memoire while speaking. If the slides contain a slide number, it can also help when wishing to display a particular slide.
You've prepared your PowerPoint presentation and arrived at the conference venue in plenty of time, clutching your floppy disk. What could possible go wrong? Unfortunately things can go wrong even before your file is installed on the PC. For example:
These things can happen - my floppy disk was corrupted at one event I spoke at (which I discovered 15 minutes before speaking) and I attended a workshop in which a floppy disk had been inserted upside-down.
Again, advance planning can help. I always make a copy of my slides available on the Web, so that if there are problems with the floppy disk drive I can download the file from a networked PC. It also helps to bring along a spare floppy disk containing the presentation (I normally carry the floppy disk in separate bags in case one is lost or stolen).
The problems with versions of PowerPoint (although this is not as much of a problem as it was when PowerPoint 97 was released, with its changed file format) can be overcome by provided a HTML version of the PowerPoint slides as a backup. Some people may even prefer to use the HTML version as it provides onscreen navigational aids, as illustrated below.
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| Figure 3: Using The HTML Version Of A PowerPoint Slide |
When installing your file on the conference PC you should be aware of potential name clashes with other speakers - for a conference in Athens, do not be surprised if you aren't the only speaker to call your file "athens-slides.ppt"!
You should install your file on the PC's hard disk, rather than using a slow and potentially unreliable floppy disk drive. Files are often installed on the PC's desktop, which should make them easy to find.
If you have the time, you may wish to load your file into PowerPoint before your talk begins. This can help you avoid wasting precious time in using Windows Explorer to find your file, launch PowerPoint , etc.
When delivering a PowerPoint presentation it is probably best to avoid using timed displays. Maurice Crockard illustrates this point well: "We had an entertaining presentation from our Deputy V-C where he tried to use [a timed PowerPoint presentation]. It's just impossible to reproduce normal talking speeds under pressure and with interruptions, audience coughing etc. (especially once they realise what's going on and seek to cause extra embarrassment!)
When you are giving a PowerPoint presentation there are a number of simple PowerPoint features which can help in delivering the presentation. It is surprising the number of people who do not seem to realise that the space bar can be used to advance to the next slide. This is much easier to use than using a mouse button or cursor control key. Indeed since many conferences will provide a laptop rather than a desktop PC, the laptop may not have a mouse: being forced to use a mouse replacement can be a nerve-racking experience in front of a large audience.
There are a number of other useful keyboard options to be aware of:
F (forward)
Move forward by one slide. Similar to the space bar, the left
mouse button and the cursor up key.
P (previous)
Move to the previous slide. Similar to the cursor down key.
B (black)
Replaces the screen display with a black screen. Useful for
switching off the display, if, say, you are responding to a
question and wish to remove the distraction of the screen
display. Easier to use than fiddling with the display projector
controls (which are likely to be different from projector to
projector).
W (white)
Replaces the screen display with a white screen. Probably not as
useful as the B key.
number<Enter>
Pressing a number followed by the <Enter> key will take you
to the numbered slide. For example, press 20 followed by
<Enter> to go to slide number 20. Much more useful than
having to go through slides one-by-one - especially if you
include the slide number on the slides and you've brought along
the thumbnails of your presentation.
Note that the right mouse button also provides access to a number of useful functions. As well as providing access to the options listed above (although with the disadvantage of allowing delegates to see what you are doing) it also allows you to use a pen to scribble on the screen display, as illustrated below.
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| Figure 4: PowerPoint Display Options |
You should ensure that screensavers (and, especially for laptops running Windows 98, powersavers) are disabled. As Dr Simon Raybould of University of Newcastle describes the consequences of not doing this can be very embarrassing:
"I once did a presentation and then took questions. The questions lasted 10 minutes. I then left for a hospital appointment and the next speaker (a friend of mine) started to talk. After 13 minutes, my PC decided to cut in my screensaver...... Consequently the assorted assembly of Deans and HoDs were treated to a display of a cartoon T Rex stomping across the screen (projected on to the wall 6 feet high) and 'tearing' the screen.."
If you are using operating systems which provide power management options, such as Windows 98 (widely used on laptops) and Windows 2000, you should also reconfigure the power options.
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| Figure 5: Remember to Change The Screensaver and Power Options |
A live demonstration of a Web site can make a presentation more interesting - but not if the demonstration goes wrong. How many hours have been wasted by delegates watching speakers reconfigure browsers, reconnecting network connections, re-entering URLs, etc.
If the presentation is to be given in a location which has good network connections, you may be confident that a live demonstration will work. There are a number of browser configuration options you should be aware of which should improve the usability of the presentation.
Ensure your browser is configured to access a proxy cache (if any)
Many Universities are protected by a firewall. Web browsers must
be configured with the address of a proxy server in order to
access off-campus resources.
Suppress unneeded toolbars
Switch off the display of toolbars which are superfluous and would add to the
screen clutter. If you are using Internet Explorer you may wish to switch to
full screen mode (using the <F11> key).
Configure the font display so text is
legible.
You may wish to display text in Arial, and at a large font size
than you would use for viewing on-screen.
Configure the display of hyperlinks
You may wish to remove the underlining of hyperlinks to enhance readability of the text.
If you are uncertain of the reliability of the network connection, you should think about alternatives to live demonstrations. Options available include:
Use images of the Web site in your PowerPoint presentation
The simplest option is to include screen images in your PowerPoint presentation.
This may provide a useful backup option - if the network works, you can give a
live demonstration, but if it doesn't you can use PowerPoint. This option can also
mean that any handouts of PowerPoint presentations included in the
delegates pack will include the screen displays.
Install the HTML files on the local PC
You may wish to install HTML files on the local PC. You will have to remember to
install accompanying images, style sheets files, etc. This technique will only
work if you wish to display a simple static Web site.
Install a Web server on the PC
If you wish to display a more sophisticated Web site, perhaps one
which uses CGI scripting, you may chose to install a Web server
on the PC. This can work, but is likely to require technical
support (and may not be possible if the PC is provided by the
conference).
Use an offline browser
You could make use of an offline browser such as those listed in
the Tucows mirror [2].
Use Lotus Screencam (or similar)
You could use Lotus Screencam or similar product for capturing
and replaying a session [3].
If the PC does have a dial-up connection, you should check the settings for dropping the connection, as it can be very irritating to have a "Network connection not available" message being displayed every 5 minutes during a presentation.
If your demonstration requires use of browser plugin technologies you should ensure that they are available (and that they are up-to-date).
Nick Daisley, University of Oxford, encountered a problem recently:
"We had a [PowerPoint presentation] which incorporated a short MPEG clip - it ran fine on the desktop PC used to prepare the presentation, and on other desktops, but resolutely would not run on the laptop which would be used for projection, until we had upgraded the MS media player to the *same version* as was used on the original computer."
The <Alt/Tab> combination is the simplest way of moving between your PowerPoint presentation, your Web browser and any other applications which may be in use. As illustrated below, it enables you to select the application you wish to display.
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| Figure 6: Using Alt-Tab |
Sadly, the projection display unit can be another source of difficulties. The PC used for presenting will have to be connected to the projection device (and hopefully the cables won't have gone missing). Once connected, the PC will have to be configured so that the image is displayed on the projector, and, ideally, on the PC screen as well. There is normally a keyboard sequence which is used to toggle between display on the PC, on the external device and on both devices. For many popular laptops, the key sequence is <FN F5> (i.e. press the <FN> key and then, while still keeping this key pressed, press the <F5> key). However you should bear in mind that the key sequences may vary on different devices.
You should familiarise yourself with the projector display controls, so that, for example, you can switch off the screen display (without powering off the projection device).
Another issue to be aware of is whether the conference organisers will provide a PC for the conference or if speakers are expected to provide their own PCs. If a PC is provided, the conference organisers should provide technical support to ensure that it is set up properly, has been optimised for use with the projection device (since PCs work on different frequencies, ideally the projector will be recalibrated every time a PC is connected).
On the other hand if you are asked to provide your own PC, or if you prefer to use your own PC (or Apple Macintosh!) you will need to be aware of the potential problems and delays in connecting your PC. In particular you should be aware of possible problems if your PC makes use of an unusual screen resolution, which the projector device cannot handle. This may be an issue if you have a modern, high-spec. laptop.
If you are using a laptops you should ensure that it is plugged into the mains - having a message displayed halfway through your talk saying that "You have only 5 minutes of power left" can be very frightening". I know from personal experience, as this happened to me once - the laptop was plugged into the main supply, but the mains was not switched on!
What if, despite following the advice given in this article, disaster strikes? Again I have personal experience of this happening - I trod on the mains cable to the PC, which became disconnected causing the PC to power off!
If something like this happens, in the words of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, "Don't Panic!". You should find that the audience is on your side and wants you to recover from the difficulty. If the PC has rebooted, a Web site is not working or the network has crashed, you may find it useful to ask the session chair or a technical support person to provide assistance. If you are feeling brave, regard the incident not as a problem but as an opportunity to engage in a more interactive form of presentation - why not ask the audience for their views on the presentation so far?
Many thanks to members of the web-support JISCmail list [4] for sharing their hints and tips, including Norman Alm, Ann Apps, Malcolm Clark, Maurice Crockard, Nick Daisley, Liz Kenny, Paul Kentish, Az Mohammed, Alan Newell, Andy Powell, Ellen Simms, Mark Stiles and Simon Raybould.
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Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
Phone : +44 1225 323943
Brian Kelly is "UK Web Focus" - a post which is responsible for advising the UK Higher and Further Education communities on Web developments. Brian is also the project manager for the Cultivate Interactive Web magazine. Before joining UKOLN Brian was the Senior Trainer at the Netskills training organisation. As a regular speaker at conferences, and in his former role as a network trainer, he has had a great deal of experience of the pitfalls which can await speakers who make use of computer technologies and networks.
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For citation purposes:
Kelly, B. "What's Happened To My Slides: Giving Presentations at Conferences", Cultivate Interactive, issue
3, 29 January 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue3/presentations/>
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