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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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