Search Disabled |
|
|
|
Search Options | Help | Site Map | Cultivate Web Site | ||||
|
| |||||
| Home | Current Issue | Index of Back Issues |
| Issue 5 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
Welcome to the fifth issue of Cultivate Interactive!
In parallel to the launch of this fifth issue of Cultivate Interactive a series of Cultivate meetings and workshops are being held in Budapest, Hungary. This gathering brings together the two main parts of the European Cultural Heritage Applications Network, Cultivate CEE and Cultivate EU. At the meetings there will be representatives from over 20 different European countries. It is hoped that each individual attending will bring their own unique knowledge and vision of the digital heritage and cultural content community allowing this vast experience and knowledge to be shared. Such conventions can only be beneficial for Museums, Libraries and Archives all over Europe.
Learning from each other is very much the unwritten theme of this issue of Cultivate Interactive.
In their astutely titled feature article Standing on the Shoulders of Giants Paul Miller, David Dawson and John Perkins discuss efforts to leverage existing synergies in digital cultural content creation programmes world-wide. Their article, which deals with the background to a meeting held in London, and reports on a number of significant outcomes that have led to ongoing activity of potentially great benefit to the digital cultural content creation community, discusses collaborative working and how it can be acheived. Within the area in which we work there is great scope for collaboration. Some of the examples given are harmonisation of funding, shared technical standards, preservation standards and general training and awareness. The article advises us to seek out synergies between projects and bear in mind principles written as a result of a meeting held in Lund meeting earlier this year that state Member States and the Commission should work together to "Create a coordination mechanism for digitisation programmes across Member States."
A number of other feature articles in this issue bolster the idea of collaboration by offering advice on how to tackle the problems that are common in memory institutes.
Nils Olander’s article explains how the Stockholm Telemuseum deals with the common problem of actually getting teenagers into the Museum. He explains that they do so by giving them something that all teenagers long for - a platform from which to speak. Since 1996 they have allowed over 800 groups of students to create low budget news programmes using their television studios. The result is an increased interest by teenagers in the museum and what Nils calls more “knowledgeable viewers who fully understand the different phases involved in the production of a program…(with heightened) awareness as to how dependent our society is on different networks”. Communication and collaboration is again seen to be paramount. Ingrid Cantwell in her article on the European Legislative Virtual Library Project (ELVIL) outlines the three main problem areas of access, learning and communication that the project has recently had to face and explains how it is dealing with them. One of the most successful ways has been through organised discussion forums that centred on problem-solving and not only on analysis. The forums are both effective and participative.
Other feature articles that also offer practical advice on the issues they face include the five IST projects providing articles: 3D-Murale, CELIP, CULTIVATE, OpenHeritage and TEL. There is a piece on the Israel Museum and the electronic surrogate by Susan Hazan which considers how they have brought new media into the museum in a creative way. Thibault Heuzé goes in to detail about how CORDIS, the European Commission’s Research and Development Information Service can help you find innovation opportunities and aid with bids for projects. Rob Davies also introduces PSInet: Public Sector Information Network.
Another more practical article is provided by Colin Beardon. He considers how we need to adapt out traditional approaches to the design of software to fit new virtual environments. He explores these ideas through the example of the Visual Assistant software developed for visualisation in the domain of theatre. Virtual environments are also considered by The CINECA team who have written about their role as a leading player in the visualization field. Paul Miller has written for us again, this time with Sally Criddle, in a overview of the projects recently awarded money by the New Opportunities Fund. And finally Leif Andresen considers the importance of user focusing in the creation of bibliotek.dk, the entry point for general public access to the Danish National Union Catalogue.
A number of the regular articles in this issue cover pertinent events in the digital cultural heritage world during the summer months. The National Node column has been written by Karin Hafner of CSC Austria and talks about six information events organised by the Austrian National Node. One of these events, The First Austrian Metadata Seminar held in Vienna on 18 May 2001 is covered in more detail by Michael Day in the At the Event column. Monica Bonnet also provides a review of the 5th European Conferences on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, held in Darmstadt, Germany.
In the Praxis column, in a follow up to last issue’s streaming video articles David Johns of Culturejam Limited takes us on a tour of audio and video encoding. And in the metadata column Christian Guetl proposes the idea for an Integrated Framework for Augmentation and Enrichment of Knowledge (IFAEK) which could be a way of providing existing Web content with more structure and context. IFAEK supplies a combination of additional information from more than one meta-service within the content of a particular Web document.
Finally in our regular DIGICULT Column, Concha Fernández de la Puente leads us around what has been happening in the European Commission in the last 4 months regarding digital heritage and cultural content. DIGICULT also seems to have been attempting to get people to learn from the experience of others. Benchmarking has been discussed as a means of providing support for improving policies and programmes and deciding on good practice. Concha also mentions TRIS, a new support measure that means that “different projects meet, exchange their experiences and develop common approaches to key challenges facing their institutions” [1]. Concha is actually leaving her job in the Information Society Technologies part of the European Commission and moving to work as a regional programmes organiser for EuropeAid. Concha has contributed through her DIGICULT Column to all the issues so far and has also been the Cultivate Project co-ordiantor. Cultivate Interactive would like to say thank you to Concha for all her hard work and wish her well in the future. Concha’s role is now being taken on by Ian Piggot whom we hope will be able to continue the column for us.
In issue 5 last but not least we also have three Misc. articles. The first is an introduction to the most fascinating library buildings in the world lead by Godfrey Oswald. The second offers details of a new European survey that discusses the potential benefits and opportunities for learners with disabilities opened up by technology. And finally, the third, provided by Philip Hunter, is a useful and detailed list of the different Content Management Systems currently available.
We hope the articles in this issue will offer you a taster of the problem solving and collaboration that is going on in the digital cultural heritage community. The potential for further coalition and learning from each other is out there.
When all is said and done we would all be wise to consider the wise words of Aldous Huxley: “Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you.”
Enjoy the issue.
Marieke Napier (Editor)
Date of Page: 1 October 2001
|
|