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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)
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By John Cosmas - October 2001
Dr. John Cosmas reports on the 3D-Murale project [1] that is developing a set of Recording, Reconstruction, Database and Visualisation tools for use by archaeologists at the excavation site and at their laboratories.
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An international team of multimedia content creators, led by Brunel University and with support from the European Union, is developing and using 3D Multimedia tools to measure, reconstruct and visualise archaeological ruins in virtual reality, using as a test case the ancient city of Sagalassos in Turkey.
The archaeological site at Sagalassos is one of the largest archaeological projects in the Mediterranean dealing with a Greco-Roman site over a period of more than a thousand years (4th century BC-7th century AD). One of the three greatest cities of ancient Pisidia, Sagalassos lies 7 km north of the village Aglasun in the province of Burdur, Turkey. The ruins of the city lie on the southern flank of the Aglasun mountain ridge (a part of the Taurus-mountains) at a height between 1400 and 1650 metres. A team of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven under the direction of Professor Marc Waelkens has been excavating the whole area since 1990 and has dug up some wonderful treasures. A consortium of universities and companies, led by Brunel University in West London, are collaborating in the European Union-supported 3D MURALE project [1] to develop 3D measurement, reconstruction and visualisation tools for use by Prof. Waelkens’ archaeological team.
New multimedia technologies will produce rich new ways of recording, cataloguing, conserving, restoring and presenting archaeological artefacts, monuments and sites. They will be used to model the Sagalassos site and show how they can be used for preserving and presenting the cultural heritage of Europe in two important ways. Firstly, by putting such new technologies in the hands of the archaeologists themselves rather than creating multimedia content after the excavations. As an important consequence, a more complete record of the finds can be created and presented to the public. Secondly, by presenting the site not as a static entity from a long-gone past, but as a vibrant place that underwent many changes throughout its existence. This includes the visualisation of the site in different eras and of the excavation as it progressed through different time layers.
The 3D-Murale system consists of Recording, Reconstruction, Database and Visualisation components.
Recording tools will be developed for measuring terrain, stratigraphy, buildings, building blocks, pottery, pottery sherds and statues on the archaeological site. The results of these measurements will be stored in the 3D-Murale database system. Reconstruction systems will use a 3D graphics tool to combine the individual measured components and reconstruct building elements and whole buildings from building blocks, pottery from pottery sherds, statues from statue elements and stratigraphy from all finds within the excavation. Any missing elements will be added later through archaeological hypothesis using 3D graphics tools and custom-built software. An integrated model will be built of the landscape, buildings, and artefacts for different eras, showing reconstructions of these periods or the current state. The model will be processed to prepare it for high quality stereoscopic visualisation and for lower quality Internet visualisation. The visual experience will also include the display of the stratigraphy. Any individual artefact (building element, building, pottery sherd, complete pottery, stones or statues) may be queried on the database and the outcome of the query visualised individually. Queries may be formed and remotely visualised over the Internet.
The archaeological team have been carrying out one of the largest and most interdisciplinary archaeological projects in the Mediterranean ever. It aims to reconstruct throughout time, that is to say. since the beginning of the Holocene period, palaeoecological and palaeo-economic events. It aims to reconstruct the evolution of regional patterns and the development of Sagalassos into an urban centre (which eventually incorporated all the others into its territory), the emergence, urban transformation, decline and final abandonment of this centre, as well as the post-occupation history of the site and its territory. The archaeologists continue to catalogue, conserve, restore or protect, and present hundred thousands of artefacts and the site as a whole.
The archaeologists will define from both a scientific and archaeological point of view a set of requirements for the MURALE technology that are necessary to produce visualisations from two eras of the archaeological site. To reproduce accurate and rapid visualisation, a set of goals and work-tasks will be derived from these requirements. Through regular testing they will also update the archaeological and general user requirements to ensure the precision and speed that can be achieved when used in situ. Regular visits will be scheduled to the site for the testing of recording equipment in field circumstances and for the provision of continuously - updated information. A set of representative test objects will be provided for testing the recording equipment. The archaeologists will closely collaborate with the technologists to continuously evaluate their progress under field conditions.
User-friendly and portable 3-D recording techniques will be required. These systems will measure a range of objects of different dimensions. They will be easy to transport, easy to use, and produce accurate and visually convincing results both for guiding ongoing conservation and anastylosis efforts and for presenting archaeological materials and sites to a wider audience of non-specialists.
A first goal is to register in situ all stratigraphical evidence, since archaeological fieldwork by its nature destroys this kind of information. Secondly, techniques need to be developed to record 3-D models of artefacts, mainly for cataloguing and visualisation, and of pottery sherds, sculptures and buildings, mainly for restoration and visualisation. Thirdly, the terrain of the site needs to be modelled in 3-D as such topographic data yield important information for the archaeologists and is vital for realistic visualisation.
Restoration involves taking the 3-D models from the recordings and completing them in a number of ways. Firstly the system must permit a virtual reconstruction of all excavation phases and their stratigraphy. Secondly this system will take 3-D models of objects or their components and allow a virtual, and possibly also the physical completion or anastylosis of pottery, statues, building elements and buildings. This will permit the virtual reconstruction of ceramic objects, either to replace a physical completion of the real object for presentation or publication purposes, or to make the selection of objects to be restored easier and to guide the conservators during this process. Finally, an integrated model must be built of the landscape, the buildings, and the artefacts for different eras, showing reconstructions for these periods or the current state.
Visualization of archaeological sites such as Sagalassos is particularly challenging due to:
Techniques need to be developed to swiftly visualise the site so that people can virtually navigate through it on a standalone high -quality site visualisation system and an Internet visualisation system. This will call for special measures, such as level-of-detail selection, prediction of next views, exploiting our reduced visual resolution when moving, etc. The visual experience will also include replays of the excavations, showing the different layers of the excavations being ‘peeled off’ one by one. This will help future archaeologists revisit the site in virtual reality in order that they make their own interpretation of the finds.
A database will be created in order to store and retrieve the artefacts, buildings and their reconstruction. The database will serve several purposes. Firstly, it will define where the pieces belong in the scene and in which period they were relevant. This will allow the user to set a time slider, after which a complete site model will be composed automatically, showing the buildings, the vegetation, and the artefacts typical for that period. Secondly, it will serve as a repository that can be used by the archaeologists to help them classify finds, to prepare restorations, and to keep track of statistics. Thirdly, the database will be a major gateway to the wider public and to other archaeologists, by making much of this information available over the Internet.
A conventional text based database will be developed for storage and retrieval of text, 2-D image and VRML image information on archaeological content such as buildings, artefacts, parts of artefacts, drawings, documents, and research papers. A query by 2-D image and 3-D object example-based database will be developed for storage and retrieval of text, video, 2-D image and 3-D voxel and VRML image information for archaeological content such as buildings, artefacts, parts of artefacts, drawings, documents, research papers etc. It will make this content available by remote Internet access for other archaeological researchers and members of the public.
Assessment, Evaluation, Dissemination, and Use
The whole MURALE technology and set of tools will be demonstrated both to specialised audiences and to non-specialised visitors. Service demonstrations will be set up to demonstrate the performance of these new tools. These results will be progressively collected and presented in demonstrations both on the site and elsewhere for larger European and other audiences. At the end of the project an overall tool performance will be delivered. It is intended that the experience and results of this project will be reproduced in trials at other European sites and in other European collections.
Dr. J.Cosmas - Brunel University (Project Co-ordinator)
john.cosmas@brunel.ac.uk
Prof. L. Van Gool - Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule,
Zurich.
Also, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium.
vangool@vision.ee.ethz.ch
D. Vanrintel - Eyetronics NV
desi.vanrintel@eyetronics.com
M. Grabner MSc - Graz University of Technology
grabner@icg.tu-graz.ac.at
Dr. M. Gervautz - Imagination Computer Services GesmbH
gervautz@imagination.at
Prof. M. Waelkens, Dr. M. Pollefeys - Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven
marc.waelkens@arts.kuleuven.ac.be
,
marc.pollefeys@esat.kuleuven.ac.be
Dr. R. Sablatnig - Vienna University of Technology
sab@prip.tuwien.ac.at
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Dr. John Cosmas
Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering
Brunel University
Uxbridge
Middlesex UB8 3PH
United Kingdom
John.cosmas@brunel.ac.uk
<http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~eestjpc/>
Phone: +44 (0)1895 203120
Fax: +44 (0)1895 258728
John Cosmas is a Reader of Multimedia Systems at Brunel University. He researches into the development of multimedia studio, television, visualisation and database systems.
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For citation purposes:
Cosmas, J. "3D Measurement & Virtual Reconstruction of Ancient Lost Worlds of Europe ", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/3d/>
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By Tuula Haavisto - October 2001
CELIP, Central and Eastern European Licensing Information Platform is working towards raising awareness among librarians about purchasing electronic material; which nowadays also includes knowledge on contracts between libraries and vendors. Buying a book or a hardcopy of a research journal and buying access to an electronic information resource are very different processes. Tuula Haavisto, CELIP Project Manager, reports on how CELIP can help librarians make the latter a lot easier.
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CELIP is funded by the European Commission and run by EBLIDA, Tuula Haavisto Library Knowledge T:mi and ten library associations in the participating countries: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.
The CELIP project is due to last 15 months, from 1 November 2000 to 31 January 2002 and consists of three main actions: A two-phase survey about the licensing situation in the countries mentioned, ten licensing workshops, and a common meeting with the representatives of right owners. Information is being disseminated via the Web site [1].
EBLIDA has been active in training librarians in copyright and licensing matters since the mid-90’s. ECUP, the European Copyright User Platform was introduced at the same time and is consistently the most well known platform, thanks to the EBLIDA Web site. The newest project, CELIP, is a direct successor to CECUP (1998-99), the successful effort which concentrated on copyright matters in the CEE countries. The library associations have now reached the status as copyright partners in their respective countries and effort is once again necessary now that concerned countries have to adopt the new EU copyright directive into their own legislation.
The need to go further from copyright to licensing information and experience sharing was made clear in the CECUP copyright workshops. The European Commission was willing to finance this project as part of the IST programme, and so CELIP began on 1 November, 2000. The partners are the same as in CECUP: EBLIDA is again in charge of co-ordinating the project, and the writer of the article is the Project Manager. Ten library associations in ten EU accessing countries take care of the work on-site. The Steering Group remains nearly the same too. It was and is a very central and responsible group. All the members are very good at sharing project information amongst themselves and with their respective countries.
The CELIP objective is to raise the awareness level of librarians about licensing issues when providing electronic services. Librarians all over the world have to learn new skills to enable them to purchase electronic material. When librarians are no longer buying ownership of physical objects like books but access to information (electronic journals and databases) the librarian is faced with the complications of provisions of use for electronic resources. CELIP is targeting these situations. The key here is not in selecting electronic resources, nor evaluating their quality or their technical level but the legal position of librarians.
CELIP is there also to maintain the good initial contacts established under CECUP between librarians and right owners in CEE countries. The second discussion on user rights in the electronic environment was organised in June 2001. We had four guests from the CEE countries and three from international or foreign right owner organisations. Our discussions were based on statements and policy papers from both sides, and they were considered to be very useful. Especially the TECUP Memorandum of Understanding) [2], an important European consensus report on electronic publishing, was presented and discussed. Many participants mentioned that it was important to recognise the support from both sides for this document. The results of the common meeting will be reported by the follow-on group to TECUP, the Frankfurt Group. The common will to continue these contacts was also expressed in the meeting.
The project, as part of its work, is producing a survey about the licensing situation in the concerned countries. The first version of the results was published on the Web in May 2001 [3].
The licensing situations in the C&EE countries vary a great deal. Single licenses in single cases are known in nearly all the CELIP countries. The consortium model is only now stepping in. Slovenia has the longest experience, from 1997 on, in a countrywide licensing consortium. In Hungary, there are more than 20 consortia between libraries and vendors, and ca. 15 in the Czech Republic. These consortia are contemporary and they have been compiled according to the subject. In the Czech Republic the Ministry of Education has been active in initiating consortia forming, and is also in charge of the costs of many of the contracts. Government financing will cover the years 2000-2003, and after that the libraries must find new ways to arrange the financing. Of the 15 consortia at least two (EBSCO and Proquest) are open for all types of libraries. Estonia, being a smaller country, is looking for a consortium co-operation with Finnish libraries. Bulgaria has recently founded its two first consortia. The initiation-maker was a vendor, Martinus Nijhof. The costs in Bulgaria are paid by libraries and partly by Tempus Project. Slovakian libraries are negotiating with the Ministry of Education about a countrywide consortium. In Romania, Latvia and Lithuania the only consortia are the eIFL consortia.
The eIFL Direct project (Electronic Information for Libraries Direct) by EBSCO and the Soros Foundation Network Library Programme is an interesting case. EIFL Direct is comprised of more than 40 countries (including the CELIP countries) making it the largest library (information) consortium in the world. It allows libraries in participating countries to have unlimited access to over 5.000 full-text, English-language journals, primarily in the humanities and social sciences. The costs for 2001 are paid by the libraries, national governments or national Soros Foundations. The advantage to the participating countries is the ready negotiated, reasonably priced framework contract.
The public libraries and librarians in the CEE countries have also been included in eIFL. Therefore they are more experienced in electronic resources, than their Western European counterparts in non-English speaking countries.
In mid-September 2001, six of the ten workshops were held. In the workshops special attention has been paid to the basic terminology and partners in licensing, to licensing statements and principles and to experiences from different countries. The national presentations given so far have covered the contract law as well as experience sharing from case libraries in the countries that have licensing contract experience. In licensing negotiations, libraries meet different legislation from the countries of the producers and vendors, and it is important to understand one’s own legal position.
There are some preceding projects which offer good ready-made material for the CELIP workshops. TECUP (Testbed implementation of the ECUP framework) [4] has already been mentioned. The material found on the ICOLC (International Coalition of Library Consortia) Web site [5] is also useful. The IFLA Licensing Principles make useful background documents [6].
A poster session about CELIP was presented at the IFLA Boston conference in August 2001. The Slovenian Steering Group member, Dr. Maja Zumer, gave a presentation about the licensing situation in these countries in the open session of the IFLA Committee on Copyright and other Legal Matters [7].
The last CELIP Steering Group meeting will be held in Helsinki in November/December 2001 in connection with the Euro ICOLC conference [8]. This offers a good opportunity to get in contact with European colleagues dealing with the same matters.
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Tuula Haavisto
Project Manager,
C/o e-Office
4. Linja 24
FIN-00530 Helsinki, Finland
Phone: +358 - 40 - 568 9396
Fax: +358 - 9 - 7289 5060
Contact information for the co-ordinator:
EBLIDA
PO Box 43300
NL-2504 AH The Hague
The Netherlands
Phone: +31 70 309 0608
Fax: +31 70 309 0708
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For citation purposes:
Haavisto, T. "CELIP: Licensing Information for Librarians in Central and Eastern Europe", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/celip/>
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By David Fuegi - October 2001
David Fuegi introduces Cultivate Central and Eastern Europe (Cultivate CEE), a new addition to the Cultivate Cultural Heritage Applications Network (CULTIVATE) [1] which supports the cooperation of memory institutions (archives, libraries and museums) under the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). It brings to the network 10 new nodes in the Accession countries. These nodes should become established from the autumn of 2001.
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CULTIVATE CEE began work on 1st April 2001. At a stroke, this added 10 more countries to the Cultivate Cultural Heritage Applications Network (CULTIVATE). In formal terms Cultivate CEE is a separate contract with the Commission with its own partner structure. In practice, it will work very closely with Cultivate EU with which it shares a common workprogramme and a common technical infrastructure. Cultivate CEE runs for 2 years and so formally ends March 2003, soon after the end of Cultivate EU. The partners met in Torun, Poland in May 2001 to plan their work and again in Vienna in June. A further meeting will be held at the end September in Budapest and from then on the new Cultivate nodes should be operational according to their local circumstances.
A full description of the Cultivate network has already been given in Cultivate Interactive [2] and no attempt is made to reproduce that here.
In essence, Cultivate CEE extends the Cultivate concept into the following countries of Central and Eastern Europe:
A co-ordinating body for cultural heritage will be established at national level in each of these countries. As a result, it is expected that
The project is coordinated by the British Council (Poland) and managed by MDR Partners (UK). The project’s partner line-up includes strong partners from all the CEE countries listed above and includes players from the libraries, museums and archives sectors.
Cultivate CEE aims to increase take up of the IST programme and awareness of its results in its target countries concentrating on the cultural heritage sector. It will work closely with NCPs and other relevant organisations and projects to achieve its aims. Whereas under the 3rd and 4th Framework Programmes a network of National Focal Points (NFPs) was established in all EU Member States as part of the Telematics for Libraries Programme, the Cultivate CEE partners have less of a tradition on which to build. Nonetheless, the Cultivate CEE partners aim to create a network of national nodes similar to those in the EU countries.
Within the archives, libraries and museums sector the CEE National Nodes will aim to:
Cultivate CEE will not duplicate the infrastructure provided by Cultivate EU. It shares the same technical partners as Cultivate EU and makes a substantial financial contribution to the provision of the following common services:
The corporate identity of CULTIVATE CEE was discussed with the partners in CULTIVATE EU at a meeting held in Vienna in June under the auspices of CSC. From a contractual perspective CULTIVATE CEE is and will remain a separate project. However from the point of view of the clients of the project, separate identities could be confusing and counterproductive. The two projects (and CULTIVATE Israel) have therefore decided to present one face to the outside world through:
Within the framework of the separate contracts on which the projects rely, it has been decided to hold joint management meetings to discuss matters of common interest (mainly the common services listed above and most aspects of marketing). The two projects have also asked to be peer-reviewed at the same time. These management arrangements fully come into effect in a joint meeting of the two projects planned to take place at the Hungarian National Library in Budapest at the end of September. Most of the national nodes will be represented and the experience should be mutually beneficial in cementing together this pan-European network.
The Central and Eastern European national nodes have begun work and are in process of:
Cultivate Russia is currently under negotiation and expected to start late in 2001. This project is expected to complete the Cultivate cluster. It will be coordinated by the British Council (Moscow) and managed by MDR Partners. It will seek to work very closely with the existing Cultivate network.
The Partners in Cultivate CEE are as follows:
| Name | Short name | Country |
| The British Council (Poland) - Coordinator | BC | UK |
| MDR Partners - Manager | MDR | UK |
| Technical partners (in both Cultivate EU and Cultivate CEE) | ||
| The Library Council | CL | IRL |
| Resource: The Council for Libraries, Museums and Archives | RESOURCE | UK |
| University of Bath | UBAH | UK |
| Cultural Service Centre Austria | CSC | A |
| Institute for Learning and Teaching Research Technology, University of Bristol (subcontractor to CL) | ILRT | UK |
| Riksbibliotektjenesten | RBT | NO |
| CEE Country Partners | ||
| Nicolas Copernicus University | NCU | PL |
| Head Office of State Archives | NDAP | PL |
| Museum of Art Lodz | MAL | PL |
| Central Library of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences | CL-BAS | BG |
| Institute of Cultural Memory | CIMEC | RO |
| Vilnius University | VU | LT |
| Ministry of Cultural Heritage (Hungary) | NEKOM | HU |
| Institute of Baltic Studies | IBS | EE |
| Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Latvia | IMCS | LV |
| Narodni Muzeum (National Museum, Prague) | NM | CZ |
| Slovak partner to be announced | SK | |
| Ministry of Culture (Slovenia) | MC | SI |
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David Fuegi
david.fuegi@mdrpartners.com
http://www.mdrpartners.com
David Fuegi manages Cultivate CEE. He is a partner in MDR Partners, a consultancy company established to engage with strategic IST developments in Europe and specialising in international work involving libraries. He is joint author of “Library Performance Indicators and Library Management Tools” (1995) and of “Study of Library Economics of Central and Eastern Europe” (1998) both published in Luxembourg by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.
He is currently project manager for LIBECON and is joint author of the project’s Millennium Study. Other major recent projects include business planning for the TACIS Russian State Library Project in Moscow and drafting public library standards for England for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. He manages the IPF public library benchmarking clubs and is special adviser to the UK Committee on Public Library Statistics. Other European library projects in which he has worked include the Publica Project (DG13), ISTAR (DG5), PLDP (DG16), PULMAN, TACIS TELRUS etc. Formerly he was Library Advisor to UK government ministers responsible for Libraries and held senior positions in public libraries.
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For citation purposes:
Fuegi, D. "Cultivate Reaches Out to Central and Eastern Europe", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/cee/>
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By Gabriele Scali, Flavio Tariffi, Stefano Cuomo, Hub Kockelkorn, Dominique DeLouis and George Mallen - October 2001
OpenHeritage [1] is a research project funded under the Fifth Framework Programme (Jan 2001 - Dec 2002) aiming to create an IT infrastructure and service to improve access to collections information held by regional museums and galleries. The collections of regionally distributed smaller museums will thus be as attractive and accessible as the larger, better known, museum collections. This "cultural driven" economy could give a significant contribution to the local economic development enabling the enrichment of local touristic and cultural assets.
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It has been pointed out by several surveys that the application of technological solutions to memory institutions in fields such as the multimedia management and valorisation of museum and library collections is failing to express substantive and sustainable economic results for a number of reasons. The main being the lack of a self-supporting economic model for the promotion and exploitation of Cultural Heritage through ICT, and the excessive "technology push" in the use of virtualisation, to the expense of a sound understanding of the global vs. local processes. The result is the improper use of innovation often deployed in an self-referential way.
A general result is that memory institutions see ICT and multimedia as something that is "pushed" towards them from the outside, with frequent rejections and a generalised lack of compliance which results in improper use and quick obsolescence. The present scenario sees a fast-paced shift from the "old" economy made of goods and physical transactions towards a new "cultural economy" based on intangible services and on accessible, on-demand "experiences" where a dominant role is played by the media industry, tourism, entertainment and cultural self-accomplishment. It is a strongly user-centred system of values where access becomes the dominant concept, in which memory institutions are in the uncomfortable position of having to compete in a new, unusual horizon subject to current market forces. This is a particularly severe problem for the multitude of less famous memory institutions that represent up to 95% of the existing Cultural Heritage (CH) in most European countries, but do not benefit from the spotlights of a prestigious location or huge "routine" touristic flows.
Nevertheless, this "diffused heritage" represents the bulk of the heritage that will fuel the media and "cultural/touristic experience" markets especially in those areas (i.e. Objective 1 areas) which have to look at their territorial assets as one of the most important leading factors of their development.
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| Figure 1: The OpenHeritage business
model |
The project's objective can be summarised in these five steps
1) The development of dynamic, computable models of territorial CH systems aimed at assessing and valorising the prospective Socio-economic strengths of each region or location. These models, will make it possible for local policy makers to determine/benchmark the positioning of each system in the competitive scenario and to enhance and leverage the local areas of excellence for the Cultural Heritage.
2) The development of an innovative solution for collections management based upon the strengths of two existing Content Management (CM) systems. This technology aims at a shift in the way memory institutions resort to technological solutions in terms of user orientation, access solutions deployment model
3) The deployment of core territorial service infrastructures (the Territorial Service Centres - TSCs) supporting memory institutions through a host of facilities management, customer relationship management, storage, promotion and transaction services that range from ensuring the network and system management of the hardware and software equipment installed in museums to the outsourced management of sophisticated Call Center functions. The TSCs bring into CH the emerging new economy model of the Application Service Provider (ASP) and represent the territory-savvy enabler that can ensure a viable and effective deployment of ICT in memory institutions, while at the same time enabling a substantive exploitation of both individual memory institutions and territorial systems.
4) The validation of the model and related technologies and services in significant test beds, through a range of technological and territorial validation activities.
5) The development of an "openheritage.com" enterprise oriented at the exploitation of the European CH on the world market. The company will develop an advanced portal on Art and Culture encompassing both traditional "community" features and business-to-business areas for the exploitation of rich media assets, mostly derived from the establishment of local systems inside territorial memory institutions.
With the aim of providing a reference point for those peoples who wish to monitor strategic location of cultural heritage resources within a territory, - such as researchers, policy makers, business people, memory institutions, OpenHeritage defines a methodology and a prototype of a digital socio-economic modelling application, intended to satisfy these needs.
Cultural and natural heritage witnesses the development of knowledge and customs for each country through the centuries. Such heritage, often damaged by speculation, negligence, and ignorance, needs to be protected and exploited, in order to preserve the peculiar characters of each country.
The wrong administration of the natural and cultural heritage leads to serious damage, therefore it is necessary to provide tools which make policy makers, memory institutions, enterprises, capable of gaining knowledge of the entity of such heritage, and of services connected to it.
The development of a "European Strategic Atlas for the Cultural Heritage" is an example of application of computer science to the human sciences sector; technical methodologies like the entity-relationship model was concretely applied to a real case scenario, in order to show the main ontologies involved within the project.
The database which will store the identified entities was designed after a detailed requirement analysis and a conceptual design phase.
As delivered output of such activities, we developed a conceptual schema, which encodes the world of Cultural and Environmental Heritage and of related services, from an operational point of view.
A consistent part of our effort was devoted to the detection and classification of the different kinds of cultural resources that are present over the European territory. Each resource brings a set of values. The definition of such values was, for some aspects, difficult, since many resource classes are very domain specific. Thus, some sector specific competence was and will be required in order to complete our analysis and populate the proposed schema with suitable data.
Although our approach has been designed in order to be compliant with further refinement steps, we believe the proposed classification hierarchies are complete and stable enough.
We recognized that it is an important goal to specify which data is to be collected and how it will be organized using an easy electronic registration.
The solution under development is a comprehensive software suite designed to support the development and delivery of digital content, namely object descriptions and interpretations, multimedia productions for public access and to provide collection management functions. It is based on the architecture of System Simulation Ltd's MUSIMS (MUSeum Information Management System) and includes modules from Space's MuseumWare multimedia production toolset.
The main components of the system are:
1. Object Description Catalogue - this is the central repository of information about the museum's objects. The object description records are defined with field structures supporting the storage of both structured information like dates, dimensions, museum numbers, location codes, links to digital images and other multimedia resources, artist names etc, as well as unstructured free text information such as the object history, construction techniques, social relevance and other interpretative content. The data definitions follow the Spectrum standard using the recently defined mda/CIMI XML DTD for museum objects.
2. The Multimedia Resource Arena - this is a file system containing all the digital images, audio and video files, 3D models, special effects and virtual reality components. Each of these multimedia resource types can be created using 3rd party, readily available tools, eg image scanning and digitising products, Photoshop for manipulating digital images, Shockwave or Flash for creating animations. The MuseumWare toolset provides a range of facilities for creating such resources. Each resource entry is uniquely identified and can therefore be linked to objects in the Object Description Catalogue. These links can be one to one, one to many, many to one or many to many.
3. The Content Development System - Based on the Object Description Catalogue, this is a set of procedures for managing the development of descriptive content for public presentation. It defines the workflow processes for authoring text, image management processes, special effects production and so on.
4. The Collection Management System - Many museums and galleries already have computerised collection management systems. The proposed solution will provide interfaces to commonly available CMS so that data can be imported into the Content Development System. In this situation there are separate but linked systems each with its own functionality, processes and practices.
5. The Publishing Pipeline - This is a set of procedures for managing the delivery of content to a Web hosting service. It allows the museum or TSC to keep their Web sites up-to-date with new content, revised content, diary events, exhibition programmes etc. all controlled by a publishing schedule.
6. Terminology Resources - These are the thesauri, key word lists and dictionaries which control the vocabularies used for object description. These are required both for standardisation of object description and for retrieval. They also provide a basis for multilingual retrieval. OpenHeritage will licence available resources such as the Getty AAT (Art and Architecture thesaurus) and ULAN (Union List of Artist Names) and make these available within the solution. It will also incorporate special resources that individual museums may have developed for their own specialised use. Again the amount of work involved in such a special configuration will be a factor in the business relationship between OpenHeritage and the museum.
TSCs are built around the idea that memory institutions should consider new technologies as fundamental instruments of valorization and promotion for themselves and the surrounding territory but technological advances point toward a new way of conducting business: changing staff roles, new organizational structure, diverse audiences, increased access, innovative collaborations and new approaches. Cultural institutions (especially smaller ones) are seldom prepared to actualize these apparently simple changes. Territorial Service Centers aim to provide them with the necessary support and coordination.
TSCs are dedicated to providing the tools museums need to do their job and to offer expertise, models, best practices, and more, for anyone interested in using new technologies and media to help understand and appreciate cultural heritage collections.
Territorial Service Center refers, therefore, to an integrated managing model that supports networks of museums by offering them outsourced know-how and technology facilities and promoting a favorable link between museums, thus creating technological and concrete geographical networks based on cultural districts.
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| Figure 2: The Open Heritage Data flow
and main actors |
TSCs are based on two main concepts:
The cooperation networks will be stronger and more efficient if they are founded on a community of shared interests over and above any technological consideration. The pooling of experience, information, knowledge and technical resources makes it possible to create a positive dynamism and to optimize budgets. Advantages include the sharing of costs and tasks, and the pooling of a wider variety of skills. Ideas are validated by a group which goes beyond the narrow confines of an individual establishment with the result that decisions benefit from greater critical objectivity and credibility. From the outset, the different technological or editorial products developed benefit from the market constituted by the consortium's own members. This gives added weight to the standards advanced by the networks and reinforces the scope for the exchange and re-use of their knowledge at a later date.
The system's logic is that the peculiar shared management services and activities of museums allow for the optimisation of each element that make up the network.
The realization of a network of museums, and the resulting sharing of strategic services, guarantees synergic relations between these institutions.
The combined administration of a museum network consents the increase of visibility, offers integrated itineraries and additional services that qualify the visitor's experience; in addition cultural events that involve the entire network are easily widespread. In this way, "minor" places will take advantage of the attractive potential of well-known sites for their development and diffusion. Moreover, this is one of the distinguishing purposes of the OpenHeritage project.
While cooperation makes it possible, in the first instance, to mobilize the resources required to implement the new technologies, the applications materialized by these technologies then allow museums to work more closely together.
Memory institutions are at risk of wasting big opportunities because of their own binds. The undeniable advantages offered by information technologies should stimulate the museum administrators to get informed on these new opportunities, acquiring a server and learning how to use it: unfortunately the necessary training would absorb internal resources already involved in other activities, and the indispensable investments would be unproductive for a single museum.
Territorial Service Centers are planned to be a significant force in helping to overcome problems of:
It follows that, the opportunity to exploit the advantages of new technologies, without doing investments directly, is offered by the Territorial Service Centers, developed with public and private incentives capable of supplying memory institutions with technical services (server, Web site, e-commerce and booking online facilities...), including the staff training, needed to directly reach the cultural heritage and tourism market thanks to an international network.
The advantage of working on the Web is that while a decisive element of forming concrete museum networks is a defined geographical context, Internet technology removes geographical binds: a community based on similar objectives and aims could be created.
The Internet can make a major contribution to the public image and face of the museum, and can make its collections and resources known and used by a world-wide audience in a way which was never previously possible. It is important that all museum staff should be aware of this, they should be encouraged to make their contributions and to take advantage of the Internet's benefits.
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| Figure 3: A TSC page |
The validation/test bed activities will test and approve the technological solutions, the territorial models and infrastructures and the global exploitation portal. These will be carried on in several Museums, organised in a pyramidal way that sees three major museums directly involved in the Consortium and another other 25 Museums with different responsibilities and representing a wide range of local Memory Institutions. These memory institutions will drive and test the technological solutions in order to provide an effective tool for the Cultural Heritage economy, and avoid the technology push effect.
Inputs will be required from staff with functions in documentation, education, interpretation, library and information services, computing, design, public relations, marketing and publications as well as those in curatorial departments. They should see the Internet as another tool which will enhance, but not replace, their traditional activities. It is important that appropriate work on the Internet should be recognized as valid professional activity, and that, for example, electronic publications should be taken into account in assessments as well as those published in printed journals.
There may be opportunities for museums to develop new services based on their Internet presence, such as remote enquiry-answering services, news services on the subjects they cover, on-line booking for events and party visits, distribution of publications and images (free or for a charge), on-line shopping services and opportunities for advertising and sponsorship. It is up to each museum to assess the possibilities and decide which will make a contribution towards its mission.
In deciding their policy for Internet activities, museums should of course consider them in the context of their overall information systems strategy. This should not only cover the preparation of material targeted at fellow professionals, the general public, children, and special interest groups, but should also consider how Internet facilities can be provided and used within the museum itself.
The global openheritage.com portal will offer a one-stop-shop, on a global scale, to all the contents and customer services hosted by the TSCs at the territorial level.; it will be powered by state-of-the-art Internet technology and will build on the previous experience of Partner CHOL in the frame of the Museum Images enterprise initiative (the new brand name chosen by CHOL for the on-line distribution of digital images).
The on-line system, that will be significantly enhanced from its present state, will extend its reach beyond the trading of image rights, to encompass a broad range of multimedia, editorial and educational services centred on Cultural Heritage.
Museum Images will showcase the Cultural Heritage of Europe and the wealth of knowledge that European museums possess, through the use of Internet technologies.
It has been recognised that an important goal is the specification of the data to be collected and how it may be organized to simplify electronic storage. Central to the Museum Image philosophy is the respect of the integrity, security and copyright of digital images entrusted by the museums for Internet distribution. To keep faith to its mission Museum Images is constantly seeking out improved and leading–edge technologies in this field.
Museum Images objectives are :
Museum Images offers publisher companies, the press and advertising a tool to search through a Europe-wide catalogue for the unknown or little-known images, a hidden source of wealth.
The Museum Images platform will allow the interpretation of the scientific descriptive fields provided by museums thanks to a search engine and lexical interrogation system which has been adapted to the language of the business.
Museum Images will also offer services such as portfolios, paste-up, protected delivery of the digital images, and the possibility of using high-bandwidth networks. It can optionally manage authorship rights for most of the images which it will offer.
And finally, Museum Images is ready to consider partnership proposals in either technological or editorial fields. It brings you the richness of the collections which it distributes and the store of knowledge which museums possess about them and that they are willing to share with you.
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| Figure 4: The access to the Global
Portal |
IST-2000-25136 OpenHeritage project aims at providing a model for the promotion and exploitation of the cultural heritage assets of smaller cultural institutions by fostering their connection to the territory. The project is developing and implementing solutions for the analysis and comprehension, valorization, regional network of museums and galleries and a dedicated IT infrastructure to support it. A strong involvement of local Memory Institutions, particularly local Museums, for developing general but customised technological solution will help in shifting from the technology push effect to a cultural driven economy.
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Gabriele Scali (First Author)
Technical Director - Space SpA
Via M. Nistri, 5
59100 - Prato
Italy
Gabriele Scali was one of the pioneers of object software engineering in Italy at the beginning of the 90's. After field experience ranging from cognitive sciences to adaptive systems, to simulation and pattern recognition, he has worked in the biomedical sector in which information technologies are not only used but also created and developed.
Flavio Tariffi
Technical Director - Space SpA
Via M. Nistri, 5
59100 - Prato
Italy
Flavio Tariffi has been dealing with ICT for Cultural Heritage topics for several years and is in particular responsible for the analysis and project management of high-tech solutions in the fields of database management systems, digital imaging, library and museum systems, advanced telecommunications applications and interactive multimedia publishing both on CD and on-line.
Stefano Cuomo
Project Coordinator - Space SpA
Via M. Nistri, 5
59100 - Prato
Italy
Stefano Cuomo comes from the academic and research world and for a long time looked after the innovation initiatives for a study centre based in Florence's University and the town hall of Prato. He is an expert of European research projects financed by regional and Community funds.
Hub Kockelkorn
ICT Project Leader - Museon The Hague Stadhouderslaan 41
2517 HV, Den Haag
The Netherlands
Hub Kockelkorn deals with IT projects, like the European OpenHeritage and Regnet projects and co-ordinates a couple of Dutch educational projects. He has participated before in two European projects (RAMA and SIMILE) and was responsible for several external projects (exhibition about the Marshall Plan, research into the user requirement for a visitor information system at EXPO 2000 in Hannover). He is a member of the advisory committee of the Foundation for the Ethnological Collections in the Netherlands and has written various publications in the field of socio-economic history and automation matters in museums.
Dominique DeLouis
President Cultural Heritage On Line
24, rue Sainte Marthe
75010 Paris
France
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). He is the marketing manager of Museums On Line and coordinated the MENHIR project. Dominique Delouis is also a consultant for UNESCO.
George Mallen
Director System Simulation Ltd
250M Bedford Chambers, Covent Garden
WC2E 8HA London
UK
George Mallen is the founder and Managing and Director of System Simulation Ltd, a software engineering firm specialising in software infrastructures for cultural heritage and e-publishing applications.
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For citation purposes:
Scali, G., Tariffi, F., Cuomo, S., Kockelkorn, H., DeLouis, D and Mallen, G. "OpenHeritage: Enabling the European Culture Economy", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/openheritage/>
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By Ute Schwens, Susann Solberg, Britta Woldering and Peter Dale - October 2001
As global networks grow in significance it is becoming more important to share knowledge and standards. By combining the resources of some of Europe's national libraries the idea of a single European Library has moved a step closer to becoming a reality. The European Library (TEL), a 30-month co-operative project of Key Action 3 [1] of the Information Societies Technology (IST) [2] research programme will provide the groundwork on which to build a pan-European service.
The main results are expected
to be the developing and testing of open standards, working
methods and practices that can readily be adopted by all national
libraries to work as a seamless partnership. The aim of this
article is to give an overall view of the projects objectives,
contents and structure.
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In addition to print media, which is likely to retain its importance in many areas, new media such as networked publications, interactive and multimedia products and services will all play an increasingly important role over the next few years. In order to structure the resulting vast flood of information for the benefit of the individual information seeker, Web gateways and portals will need to be created and continuously upgraded. This task requires international co-operation with regard to both technology and content, as is already happening with the new communication networks that have already been developed to act as international cross border “tools”.
In the TEL project [3] several of the leading European national libraries and institutions are aiming to jointly develop the basis for such a concept of a Web portal to facilitate easier and seamless access to this rich seam of information. TEL officially began on February 1, 2001. The project is largely being funded by the European Commission as an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme and is scheduled to run for 30 months. In addition to the EC funding the participating libraries have made a firm commitment to contribute a significant proportion of the development costs from their own resources, thus emphasising the importance that they place on a successful outcome, and a future operational service.
Eight national libraries and the national bibliographic centre of Italy are the active participants during the project phase of TEL. The Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) is also a full partner, and it is acting on behalf of the remaining national libraries who are members of CENL. After the conclusion of the project phase the concepts and findings emerging from TEL will be offered for adoption and further development by any other interested national libraries that have not been involved in the project phase, and it is hoped that these libraries will play a full part in the eventual operational service. The Project Co-ordinator and any of the TEL partners will be happy to discuss the progress of the project at any time so that any potential new participating libraries can begin preparations for taking part in the operational service as soon as is practical.
The project partners are:
National libraries are important “content-owners” in their own right, having national and comprehensive collection mandates in their respective countries and they have a close relationship with publishers and other rights-owners. Apart from this they are not only interlocked within a variety of co-operative structures but also play an important role, and sometime assume the leadership, within their national co-operative information and library systems. Their traditionally good contacts with publishers and rights-owners are beneficial to a continuing dialogue between public and private information suppliers so that services and contents can be offered to information seekers in a form that is easy to use, transparent, structured and comprehensive.
It is the aim of the TEL project to create the technical, legal and organisational means for a comprehensive European information service on the basis of decentralized records of either conventional or digital collections of the participating national libraries, although the emphasis during the project phase will be on digital collections. In the future it is hoped that it will be possible to search and order documents directly from the collections of the participating European national libraries by entering through a single portal and running a single search. It will be possible to access electronic publications directly. An important consideration that still has to be settled is the clarification and definition of copyright and licensing questions in each of the participating countries, and trans-nationally; the development of a business model for TEL will hopefully play an important role in resolving this. It has to be emphasised that TEL is not a technical project which aims to develop software and interfaces in the first place. The primary aim is the construction of a cooperation framework for better access to the great national holdings in conventional as well as digital formats. Access to electronic documents has priority here. The more electronic documents that become available (and the number of such publications is increasing exponentially), the more difficult it becomes to provide unitary access, as they are difficult to find within the flood of information. Sometimes, also, legal restrictions impede their usage.
In the TEL project consideration is being given to the difficult question of how Europe-wide access to the collections of the national libraries, on site as well as from other countries, can be made possible. An important precondition is the creation of the necessary organisational and technical fundamentals for the long term establishment of a European digital library consisting of distributed digital collections. The existing digital libraries of the participants are being included in this work.
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| Members of work package 5, Dissemination and Use of the project “The European Library” (TEL) and authors of the article about TEL. From the left: Susann Solberg, Dr. Britta Woldering, Peter Dale and Ute Schwens (work package leader) |
Gabriel [4] the World Wide Web service of the CENL national libraries, which was established in 1997, has a significant role to play in all of this. Currently 41 national libraries from 39 member states of the European Council participate in Gabriel. The service offers, via a single Internet address, individual access and consistently structured information about the European national libraries, their collections and services. Gabriel provides an extremely useful model for further networked services in international librarianship, apart from its most useful function as an online guide to the national libraries. The basic concept of Gabriel is very closely linked with the aims of TEL.
The main results expected to emerge from TEL consist include:
As the project is primarily concerned with the development of a framework for co-operation, the technical aspect is limited to specifying the requirements for an interoperable test bed. The individual participants will be responsible for the development and implementation of operable (and interoperable) systems and services after the end of the project.
In accordance with the overall aims of TEL the project tasks are divided into four main workpackages:
In the first workpackage it is intended to consolidate current procedures in respect of deposit (voluntary or statutory), copyright and user rights between national libraries and publishers on a national level as well as elaborating general standardised procedures on a European level by means of pragmatic guidelines and the development of rational negotiation procedures. TEL will aim to engage as partners the larger publishers of electronic publications as well as national and European publishers associations.
Workpackage Leader: Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Netherlands)
Always keeping an eye on the results of the other workpackages, in this workpackage the TEL participants will aim to generate business plans and models to be applied within a mutually-agreed co-operation framework (product definition, price models, etc.) The work will be based upon intensive market research and user surveys. Beyond this the partners’ individual and collective aims concerning service utilisation shall be clarified, and their practices and procedures regarding registration and clearing etc. will be closely examined with a view to standardising these practices wherever possible.
Workpackage Leader: The British Library
Co-operating closely with, and drawing on the results of, other relevant projects and agents a joint practicable procedure concerning metadata standards and schemes will be developed in order to support broader access to online and offline digital materials in national libraries. In order to facilitate this work metadata from publishers will be integrated, and this workpackage intends to identify the best way of achieving this aim. In order to be consistent a “virtual” European library needs to offer multilingual search possibilities and services. Therefore, a prototype for a multilingual service will be developed within TEL. The results of the earlier Multilingual Access to Subject Headings (MACS) [5] project fit very logically into the planned model. MACS started in 1999 as a CENL project and delivered a working prototype early in 2001.
Workpackage Leader: Koninklijke Bibliotheek (The Netherlands)
For the operation of TEL the functional and technical specifications for the development of optimal searching possibilities in decentralized databases as well as on Z38.50 and on XML platforms via a joint portal are to be developed in this workpackage.
With the test beds for Z39.50 and XML the following aspects are being considered: access, content, interoperability and performance. Benchmarking will be developed beyond this. The test beds can later be passed on to other national libraries for further utilisation and will serve in this way for generating a “best practice”. It is emphasised that it is not the task of this workpackage to create a mini-version of a feasible system; the only development during TEL will be testbeds.
Workpackage Leader: Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany)
A fifth work package is responsible for all aspects of publicity and public relations, the organisation of workshops and seminars, the dissemination and publication of project results, and the maintenance of a dedicated project Web site.
This workpackage will also, during the lifetime of the project, arrange for initial steps to be taken towards the actual utilization of the project findings and the setting up of an operational service.
Workpackage Leader: Die Deutsche Bibliothek (Germany)
The apparently endless possibilities for global communication that have been made available by the Internet, as well as the requirements resulting from the massive emergence of Web-based and other electronic publications has created an exciting new field of work. This has led to a range of accompanying features such as quite sophisticated new technical requirements, complicated legal questions and high costs. A co-operative European project like “The European Library” is well-placed to create scope for development in this field by taking advantage of synergy effects and by developing software tools for creating a full range of rationalization potentials in the service-delivery of Europe’s national libraries.
TEL is still at a very early stage of its work, and few findings are available yet for public consumption. However, in the coming months the results will begin to flow and they will be made available on the constantly updated project Web site [3]. Cultivate readers are invited to follow the progress of TEL by constantly re-visiting the Web site or by subscribing to the TEL newsletter. Anyone who requires more personal attention is welcome to get in touch with the Co-ordinator; contact details are given below.
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Ute Schwens
Deputy Director of Die Deutsche Bibliothek
TEL Work Package Leader and member of the TEL Management
Committee
Ute Schwens is the Permanent Deputy of the Director General of Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main. Ute is a Certified librarian and the positions she has held include: Assistant to the Director General and Head of Department, Bibliographic Services. After qualifying as a senior librarian she was Head of Department, Digital Library and Director Services and Archives (Reader Services, National Bibliographic Services). Since 1999 she has been Permanent Deputy of the Director General of Die Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt am Main.
In the TEL project Ute is manager of the TEL activities of Die Deutsche Bibliothek, a member of the TEL Management Committee and Workpackage Leader for Workpackage 5 (Dissemination and Use). She also plays a prominent role in the CENL/FEP Joint Committee on Electronic Publications which is acting as an Advisory Committee for Workpackage 1 (Publisher Relations).
Susann Solberg
Assistant to the Director General of Die Deutsche
Bibliothek
Susann Solberg is the Deutsche Bibliothek, Assistant to the Director General and responsible for public relations. Susann is a Certified librarian, with experience in descriptive cataloguing, the National ISSN-Centre, subject indexing, and in the periodicals acquisition department as press officer. Since 1999 she has been Assistant to the Director General and responsible for public relations. In the TEL project she has a primary role in Workpackage 5 (Dissemination and Use) and and is the DDB representative for Workpackage 2 (Business plans and models).
Dr. Britta Woldering
TEL representative
Britta Woldering received her PhD from the Department of Japanese Studies of Ruprecht-Karls-University in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1997. In 1997/1998 she was a trainee at the Library of Trier University, where she obtained her qualification as a senior librarian in 1999.
Since 2000 Britta has been a project officer at Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main. She works on the CARMEN project WP12, which deals with cross-concordances of thesauri for Social Sciences. In the TEL project she is assisting on all issues in which DDB is involved within the TEL project and in particular she is a prominent member of the team working on Workpackage 5 (Dissemination and Use).
Peter Dale
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
United Kingdom
Phone + 44 20 7412 7078
Fax + 44 20 7412 7018
Peter Dale has worked in various departments of Bibliographic Services in the British Library. After many years working in the BLAISE database services he took up a more prominent role in the marketing of BL’s bibliographic services. In the last few years the main emphasis of his work has moved towards international co-operation among Europe’s national libraries, with an active role in initiatives such as CoBRA and GABRIEL. He is the overall Project Co-ordinator for TEL and as such is Workpackage Leader for Workpackage 6 (Project Management/ Liaison with the EC), and additionally plays an active role in Workpackage 1 (Publisher Relations), Workpackage 2 (Business plans and models).and Workpackage 5 (Dissemination and Use).
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For citation purposes:
Schwens, U., Solberg. S., Woldering, B. and Dale, P. "The European Library (TEL) – The Gate to Europe’s Knowledge", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/tel/>
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By Nils Olander - October 2001
Do you have problems getting teenagers into your Museum? Nils Olander explains how Telemuseum [1], based in Stockholm, tackled this problem by allowing them to create low budget news programmes using Telemuseum’s television studios.
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It has always been difficult to get fourteen, fifteen and
sixteen year olds interested in museums. This is usually because
they are interested in other areas which they feel are more
important to them; such as experiencing life, exploring future
possibilities and discovering love. Evidently, teenagers do not
seem to find these things at museums.
Today’s teenagers demand much more out of their adolescent existence than the youth of the sixties. Thirty years ago, a teenager thought of life as a carefree existence where one enjoyed oneself by going to the movies, eating at a restaurant or simply surfing television channels. However, nowadays is it more important for them to get hands on experience that has practical value.
If this line of reasoning is applied to the study programs available at museums and to the pedagogy of these programs it follows that in museums teenagers should be their own guides and project leaders. In every instance, it should be the teenagers themselves who come to fully value and appreciate their surroundings without any insistence from us.
I am a museum teacher and can usually instinctively know if an exhibition or showing has turned out to be a success. Judging success and understanding the benefit people receive from an event is also helped by feedback from satisfied groups, thank you notes and even applause. This kind of feedback is very rewarding and keeps you interested in your work at the museum. Sometimes, you can even experience a real sense of achievement and pleasure from a successful exhibition or showing. Such feelings give you the necessary energy and drive to move on to deal with the next group waiting its turn at the museum.
It is this pleasure that those working in the museum community would like teenagers feel. It should be possible to create situations where teenagers can experience the same “kick” from an exhibition that we do. We want them to go out of the museum gates with a genuine feeling that inside the museum walls lie rich and exciting ways of experiencing life.
I think the key to attracting teenagers lies in letting them act publicly, in allowing them to be somebody, in making them a part of something, in giving them the chance to create something noticeable and in allowing them to experience something which feels real and worthwhile.
School outings to museums are usually fairly exciting, learning experiences. However the presentation phase, carried out after the visit has repeatedly been overlooked. Creative solutions for how such presentations should be carried out are often difficult to come by. Such presentations sometimes take the form of a summary with recommendations or conclusions, a reporting session for others in the group, an exhibition at the school library or even a written account of the outing. Usually these follow up presentations fail to materialise leaving the pedagogic sequence of learning activities incomplete. In short, there is often no presentation in most cases.
So what if the presentation is the most important phase of a museum visit? Emphasis should be placed on making sure that a good presentation becomes the focal point after a museum visit. To put such a situation in to practice, there should be a sphere which is widely accessible and available to both students and teachers alike. This means there must be a public sphere for teenagers to act in which is large enough to incite their interest to act. A library space, a classroom environment or a circle of schoolmates is simply not good enough.
Today’s public sphere includes airwaves, the media and networks. In order to reach teenagers, we should be bold enough to use which ever means are available to us.
Please don’t stop reading! I’m not about to lecture on the Internet as the solution to all problems. In contrast, I actually want to assert that the Internet is perhaps not entirely suitable for this particular situation. Making a presentation available on a Web site is like recording a message on an answering machine. You hope that interested teenagers will come to your Web site just as you hope that callers will listen to your recorded message in full.
The airwaves, on the other hand, offer us tremendous opportunities.
The Telecommunications Museum (Telemuseum) in Stockholm shows the depicting developments in telecommunications within the fields of telegraphy, telephony, radio and television. Since 1996, Telemuseum has been a base for activities for teenagers from Swedish schools. Using their own resourcefulness, teenagers produce their own news programs in the television studio. The news programs are then transmitted on cable television network to over 350,000 households. There is a daily transmission at 17:40. These activities have been up and running since 1996 and have resulted in approximately 800 groups of students, primarily from high school to senior high school level, broadcasting their own news programs over the airwaves.
 |
| The Telemuseum Studio |
The purpose of this project is not to train all teenagers who participate in the project to in becoming presenters. Rather, we would like them to become more knowledgeable viewers who fully understand the different phases involved in the production of a program. We would also like to heighten their awareness as to how dependent our society is on different networks.
There are approximately nine groups which participate in ‘T-news’ every week. Each group consists of roughly 15 students. Over a period of three hours, the group works in a fully equipped television studio. The studio offers the group access to The Swedish Newspaper Telegram Bureau (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå -TT), The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (Sveriges Metrologiska och Hydrologiska Institut - SMHT) and to news bureaus available on the Internet. The students in the group take on the roles of chief editor, producer, meteorologist, local and foreign sport reporters as well as domestic and foreign country correspondents. During the first two hours, they collect news releases, discuss the content, compile the news, edit it and put together a script. Sometimes, they also conduct interviews by telephone. Often they will interview students of a similar age category at the Swedish school in London. Some groups even bring with them a videotape or other material that they have prepared beforehand.
During the last remaining hour, a number of students will re-group and take on the roles of camera operators and news presenters. After only one rehearsal in front of the cameras, they tape the program. The students handle all technical work themselves and tend to do a splendid job. Learning how to conduct database searches, operate cameras, splice and edit pictures and work the microphones takes only up to about 10 minutes in 90% of cases. The students manage to learn how to do things at an amazing pace.
 |
| Filming T-news |
The success we have experienced with ‘T-news’ has given us the drive to spread the idea and to try and encourage the same kind of activities in other areas. If our plans work out well, we believe that we can launch Internet based video meetings among teenagers within different broadcasting and editorial areas of television. During working days, the various groups of teenagers can then discuss their selection of news items with one another.
As a further development, we are exploring the possibility of getting in touch with similar types of projects in other countries. Perhaps there are already similar activities in telemuseums around Europe. It would be useful for teenage students to get in touch with others of similar age groups. Even if their discussions take place with difficulty in using the English language, such discussions are still beneficial. Mutual exchanges over actual events and happenings can stimulate everyone to get involved. In effect, each person can become the source of foreign news and correspondence for the other. And such exchanges do not need to take place only through video meetings via the Internet. Telephone calls are also a very effective way of getting good work done. Often, telephone calls are more functional than Internet based communication.
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Nils Olander
Telemuseum
Box 27842
S-115 93 Stockholm
SWEDEN
Phone: 46 15 91 33 29
Fax: 46 86 70 81 27
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For citation purposes:
Olander, N. "T-News: Bridging the Museum Generation Gap", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 october 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/telemuseum/>
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By Paul Miller, David Dawson and John Perkins - October 2001
Paul Miller, David Dawson and John Perkins report on a recent meeting at which representatives of national and international cultural content creation programmes from around the world were invited to consider scope for greater collaboration.
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"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders
of giants"
Sir Isaac Newton, cited in The Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations
The wealth of nations is becoming increasingly visible online. Indeed, many perceive dissemination of their cultural identity via the Web as a means of maintaining their individuality against the homogenising tendencies of the English–speaking world. Other reasons for this movement online are many and varied, as are the sources of money utilised in content creation.
However, the largely piecemeal nature of digital content creation, and the varied approaches taken by different projects raise the spectre of what Terry Kuny [1] and others have referred to as an encroaching Digital Dark Ages. Now, with some evidence of a political will behind us, with a raft of new programmes in their infancy, and with clear lessons to be learned from innovators, it is the time to act, and not to continue avoiding the decisions that will help to mould the next generation of truly user–focussed, interoperable, services.
For two days in July, a small group of decision makers and policy developers from Europe, Canada, the USA and New Zealand met in London, exploring the extent to which each could learn from the lessons of the others, and identifying areas in which collaborative work might be of mutual benefit [2]. This article explores some of the background to the meeting, 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 in our memory institutions [3] and beyond.
 |
| The view of St Paul's Cathedral, the
Thames, and central London from our meeting venue. Photograph taken by Gilles Saint–Laurent, National Library of Canada. |
In countries around the world, significant amounts of money are being spent in making a range of cultural heritage resources available online. In the United Kingdom, some £50,000,000 (€79,000,000) was allocated earlier this summer as successful applicants to the New Opportunities Fund's (NOF) Digitisation Programme [4] were announced [5], and there are high hopes of Culture Online [6] building on this exciting beginning. In Canada, the Federal Government's Canadian Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7] is spending $CAN75,000,000 (€53,500,000) on content digitisation programmes in libraries, museums, and archives, and over $CAN100,000,000 (€71,500,000) has been allocated [8] under the $CAN500,000,000 (€357,300,000) Tomorrow Starts Today banner [9]. The sums involved are impressive, but these programmes are not unusual, and most countries can now point to similar developments.
In the United States, without established Federal programmes in this area, the picture is less clear. Individual institutions, and consortia such as the Research Libraries Group (RLG) [10] and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) [11] are certainly active in creating content, and in considering issues related to digitisation. However, a national framework is yet to emerge. The formation of the Government–funded Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) [12], and the work it has begun to do in partnership with others, suggests that there may be potential for a more joined up approach across the United States in the future.
All of these programmes have several aspects that are clearly common, not least their remit to bring cultural heritage resources to a wider audience by means of online dissemination.
Outside of the United States, much of the support for the current wave of content creation is emanating from the public sector in one form or another. It is difficult to identify cases in which such money is being allocated to the digitisation of cultural materials purely for their sake. Rather, much of the money rides on the back of other agendas such as high–profile Government commitments to electronic service delivery [13], Learning [14], and the like. Whilst the money undeniably remains welcome, the multitude of initiatives under which it can be made available for projects to spend raises issues as priorities often differ from initiative to initiative, and may well even conflict. At the inaugural meeting of the United Kingdom's Forum for Network Coordination [15] late in 2000, for example, the need for greater harmonisation of funding (timescales, application processes, constraints, etc.) emerged as a key concern for members.
Principal drivers for funding of content creation differ around the world, but clear patterns may often be seen. In several southern European countries, for example, much of the large–scale content creation is closely aligned to the needs of Tourism, whereas further north there is more of an association with broadly learning–related themes such as lifelong learning and social inclusion. One driver is not necessarily 'better' than the other, and nor are they mutually exclusive, but they certainly carry different implications for the project and, possibly, for the longer term viability of the resources it directly produces.
Whatever the source of funding, there are usually constraints attached to the way in which funds can be spent, with many of these constraints having an effect upon what may be digitised and how. Given a large collection of physical artefacts, some of which are well known or exemplary, but many of which are simply further examples of a type, very different strategies would most likely be adopted if the funding were tourism related than if there were a more formal educational mandate from the funder. In the former case, it is perhaps probable that the appealing, famous, artefacts would be digitised; whilst in the latter there might either be a more even sampling of the collection or greater effort expended to digitise everything. In multilingual countries, linguistic constraints often apply. Canada's Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7], for example, requires 50% of the content to be available in French. Preservation of the digital resource adds a further dimension, with some sources of funding more likely to accept the cost of capturing and holding extremely high resolution imagery than others, in which there might be more emphasis simply upon capturing images suitable for the display medium to be used in the short term.
In examining the work being done in many of the current digital content creation programmes, a number of areas emerge in which consideration of common practices might prove beneficial. The most often identified of these is the development of shared technical standards and guidelines, which are addressed more fully below. As with broader considerations of interoperability [16], though, the common ground between these programmes is certainly not restricted to the purely technical.
Other areas in which there is scope for collaboration include preservation, training and awareness raising (of both end users and staff), consideration of the changing roles of memory institutions, dissemination of best practice, development of (physical or virtual) centres of expertise, exploration of IPR issues, engagement with funders and others in developing coherent programmes, and leveraging of collaborative pressure in facilitating change. Some of these are addressed further below, with others merely identified by the group as important for future work.
In a number of fora, groups are increasingly coming together and attempting to draw maximum benefit from the synergies which exist between projects under their purview; synergies which, in the past, have often not been exploited. In the United Kingdom, for example, the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) explicitly sought to gain interoperability, financial and practical economies of scale, and a greater sense of inter–project community by grouping separate bids for funding together in Consortia, and by providing a common set of technical guidelines across all of the projects within their digitisation programme [4]. Also of relevance to the European audience of Cultivate Interactive is the Commission–sponsored work on coordination mechanisms for the digitisation programmes already underway within European Member States [17]. This activity falls under the e-Europe banner [18], and was initiated at a meeting in Lund, Sweden, in April of this year. The Lund meeting resulted in a set of wide–ranging Principles around the e–Europe Action Plan's Objective 3(d) [19], part of which calls for Member States and the Commission to work together to
"Create a coordination mechanism for digitisation programmes across Member States."
The Lund Principles are available from the meeting Web site in all official languages [14], and parts of the associated Action Plan are already being taken forward under the leadership of various Member States.
Elsewhere, too, there are moves towards adoption of common approaches, although most of the sustained efforts are often restricted mainly to technical considerations such as those discussed, below.
The incentive for the meeting held in London was a recognition that, although an increasing amount of work was being done, it tended to take place on a national (c.f. Canada's Standards and Guidelines for Digitization Projects [20], produced by their Interdepartmental Interoperability Forum for the Canadian Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7]); regional (c.f. Lund [17] and other work by the European Commission's Cultural Heritage Unit [21]); or project/ consortium (c.f. NINCH's best practice working group [22], or the guidelines under development by RLG for their Cultural Materials Initiative [23]) basis.
Although all of these were — and continue to be — important in advancing the situation, none appeared to have the breadth, scope, and mandate to tackle a range of problems internationally. A meeting was therefore called at which the attendees explored the scope for joining up much of the existing work and producing outputs explicitly aimed beyond the relatively narrow constituencies of the existing efforts.
Although some funders are noticeably reticent in their desire to recommend or require a common technical basis to the projects they fund, there is a growing trend towards the creation of programme–wide guidelines, and even the emergence of technical compliance as a condition of grant in some cases. With several of the meeting's participants already implementing such documents, and others engaged in creating them, there was a clear interest in exploring the feasibility of moving towards a common view of appropriate requirements.
Shared sets of technical standards and guidelines are often seen as the logical first step in ensuring a degree of conformity across work being done within an individual programme. There therefore appears to also be merit in seeking a similar degree of harmonisation between programmes.
Existing approaches vary, covering everything from the optional support of a Guide to Good Practice [24], through to mandatory conformance to a set of specified standards [25] as a condition of grant. Even in the latter case, as demonstrated in the Guidelines prepared for the nof–digi Programme for example [25], the documents tend to contain significant quantities of guidance rather than prescription, and even the notionally prescribed elements of the document are open to a degree of interpretation and modification where stated requirements are clearly contrary to the interests of a given project. The NOF document and others, for example, make liberal use of IETF terminology throughout;
"The words 'must, should and may' when printed in bold text have precise meanings in the context of this document.
It is important to stress, though, that documents such as these are in no way intended as a straitjacket on innovation, ensuring a bland and vanilla set of projects conforming to some overly prescriptive standardised world view. Rather, the documents tend to leverage well–established best practice, and lay a set of stable, interoperable, sustainable, foundations upon which truly innovative and worthwhile projects will be built and maintained.
Already, there is evidence of movement towards harmonisation of documents in this area. The recent Standards and Guidelines for Digitization Projects [20] for Canada's Digital Cultural Content Initiative [7] and Working with the DNER: Standards and Guidelines to Build a National Resource [26] from the UK Distributed National Electronic Resource [27], for example, are both closely based upon the NOF Guidelines [25], and there is further interest in the USA and elsewhere to similarly build upon this foundation.
Rather than each project or initiative cannibalising documents from previous programmes and adding new requirements of their own, there certainly appears to be scope for a single overarching document, free of the parochial requirements of individual programmes, and structured in such a way as to allow the easy addition of local requirements as appropriate. Such a document might be badged by a wide range of organisations internationally, and would describe those common requirements that seem to appear in almost every technical specification currently in use. Work is underway to examine as many existing technical standards and guidelines documents from memory institutions as possible, and those in possession of such documents are invited to contact the authors.
Over the two days of meeting in London, attendees covered a wide range of topics. There was clear consensus on the need to improve the current situation, and on areas in which work should most urgently be taken forward. The group aims to meet again in the first quarter of 2002, probably in North America, and is already approaching significant stakeholders who were not invited to the first meeting, in order to gain the benefit of their expertise. Although participants at the first meeting were predominantly from Europe and North America, electronic communications with colleagues world–wide suggest great interest in future participation.
Between now and the next meeting, a number of actions are to be completed, including the publication of this paper.
The principal remaining actions include:
The group will draft a number of focussed position statements, seeking to identify key issues and to provide a strong policy support across these. The group will begin by drafting the following statements:-
The group has identified a number of common issues where early information sharing will inform the development of further position statements, or indicate the urgent need for a co-ordinated approach to research. The following areas were identified at this initial stage:-
Additionally, the group identified the following as an initial key action:-
Technical standards
Finally, members of the group will work to enable discussion of these issues more generally, and seek specifically to engage with those grant giving bodies who do not currently offer centralised guidance on the issues laid out, above.
Notice of public deliverables from this group will be given
via e–mail to various community mailing lists. Those who are
interested in receiving notification of all such deliverables are
invited to join the public mailing list,
interoperability [29], hosted
by the UK JISCmail service.
To join this list, send a message to
with the body of the message reading
join interoperability Your_Firstname
Your_Lastname
--
e.g.
join interoperability Paul Miller
--
The authors wish to thank all of those who travelled to London
— at very short notice — to participate in this
meeting. Without their attendance and ongoing participation, this
initiative would be much diminished. Thanks are also due to
Resource for the support that made it possible to meet in the
first place, and to the COMPASS team at the British Museum (http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/compass/
),
who hosted us for an evening reception during the meeting.
Finally, thanks to Gilles Saint-Laurent from the National Library
of Canada, who supplied a photograph of the fine view from our
meeting room to illustrate this paper!
Participants at the meeting were: Chris Anderson (New Opportunities Fund, UK), Mandy Barrie (Department of Culture, Media and Sport, UK), Chris Batt (Resource, UK), Rosa Botterill (European Museums' Information Institute), René Bouchard (Canadian Heritage, Canada), David Dawson (Resource, UK), Louise Edwards (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), Kati Geber (Canadian Heritage Information Network, Canada), David Green (National Initiative for Networked Cultural Heritage, USA), Tony Gill (Research Libraries Group, USA), Susan Haigh (National Library of Canada, Canada), Cliff Lynch (Coalition for Networked Information, USA), Liz Lyon (UKOLN, UK), Paul Miller (UKOLN, UK), Sarah Mitchell (New Opportunities Fund, UK), John Perkins (Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information, Canada), Nick Poole (Resource, UK), Joyce Ray (Institute of Museum and Library Services, USA), Bernard Smith (European Commission), Ian Witten (New Zealand Digital Library Project, New Zealand).
The meeting was conceived and realised as a partnership between UKOLN, Resource and CIMI.
interoperability mailing list.
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Paul
Miller
Interoperability Focus
UKOLN
United Kingdom
p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/>
Phone: +44 1482 466890
Paul holds the post of Interoperability Focus at UKOLN. This
post is jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC — www.jisc.ac.uk/
) of the United
Kingdom's Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, and by
Resource, the Government agency responsible for libraries,
museums and archives (www.resource.gov.uk/).
Paul's background is in archaeology, where his PhD research examined the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in mapping deposits buried beneath modern cities, concentrating specifically upon the archaeologically rich and varied city of York.
In his current work, Paul is responsible for encouraging and
facilitating the development of interoperable solutions across a
range of domains, principally museums, libraries, archives, and
government. Paul sits on a wide range of committees and working
groups related to this area, both internationally (for example,
the executive committees of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(DCMI — www.dublincore.org/
) and the CIMI
Consortium (CIMI — www.cimi.org/) and within the
UK.
Previously, Paul worked for the Archaeology Data Service (ADS
— ads.ahds.ac.uk/
), a
service provider of the UK Arts & Humanities Data Service.
Here, he was responsible for designing and establishing the
catalogue, which now contains content from local and national
archaeological agencies across the UK.
David Dawson
Senior ICT Adviser
Resource: the Council for Museums Archives & Libraries
United Kingdom
david.dawson@resource.gov.uk
<http://www.resource.gov.uk/>
Phone: +44 20 72731415
David Dawson is one of the Senior Network Advisers within the Learning and Information Society Team (LIST) of Resource.
David studied Archaeology at Durham University, and completed
the Museum Studies Course at Leicester in 1985, before becoming
an Associate of the Museums Association in 1988. He worked in a
range of museums before joining the Museum Documentation
Association (www.mda.org.uk/
) in 1992, as
Business Manager of mda Services, before becoming Outreach
Manager (ICT), giving advice and training to museums in
documenting their collections, with a focus on helping small
museums as well as working with a number of museums in the UK and
abroad. Whilst at mda, he was closely involved in the development
of the Aquarelle Project (aquarelle.inria.fr/aquarelle/welcome.html
).
In 1998 David joined the Museums & Galleries Commission
(www.museums.gov.uk/
) as
New Technology Adviser, before becoming Senior ICT Adviser for
Resource. He works particularly on ICT in museums, managing the
DCMS/Resource IT Challenge Fund, acting as an expert adviser to
the New Opportunities Fund, and working on a range of other
projects and strategic developments, such as Culture Online (www.cultureonline.gov.uk/
). David is
currently a member of the Office of the e–Envoy Broadband
Research group and is the nominated UK Representative on the EU
activity to Coordinate National Digitisation Policies.
John
Perkins
Executive Director
CIMI Consortium
Canada
jperkins@fox.nstn.ca
<http://www.cimi.org/>
Phone: +1 902 4295392
John Perkins is Executive Director of the Consortium for the
Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI — www.cimi.org/
).
CIMI is a group of the world's most prestigious museums,
technology companies, and libraries working to advance museum
digital intelligence through standards, research, testbeds,
advocacy, training and international collaboration. Current
interests are in the area of digital information object
management and interchange for museums, metadata harvesting, and
distributed searching, mobile computing, and content architecture
for Semantic Web applications.
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For citation purposes:
Miller, P., Dawson, D. & Perkins, J. "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/giants/>
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By Leif Andresen - October 2001
Leif Andresen introduces bibliotek.dk, the user-focused entry point for general public access to the Danish National Union Catalogue. bibliotek.dk provides information on what has been published in Denmark, and what is currently available in all Danish public libraries.
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Since late 2000 bibliotek.dk [1] has been giving the general public access to the Danish National Union Catalogue. The Danish National Union Catalogue includes holdings information from nearly all Danish Public Libraries and most of the publicly available research libraries. Users now have direct access free of charge and the ability to send off requests to most Danish libraries.
In order to provide every citizen in Denmark with equal opportunity for searching, finding and gaining access to information, the libraries’ shared catalogue of holdings was made available to everyone. It is now possible to request books, articles and other media to be collected from the user’s own library.
Right from the beginning of the site it was decided that only moderate change to the old system would be necessary. There are many perspectives in a common database with general access, but the intention has always been that the project should be a realistic one and go into operation as quickly as possible. The development of many new, exciting facilities takes time and would certainly have postponed the opening for quite a while.
In the development of bibliotek.dk, attention was always focused on the end user. The marketing of libraries is an important aspect of bibliotek.dk, but the presentation of the site is not aimed primarily at promoting the libraries, but rather at providing the users with collective access to all the libraries.
The User interface, as well as the content, was always intended to live up to the requirements and expectations of the user. From the beginning it was decided to develop the user interface on the assumption that the user had a minimum of knowledge of how to use PC and Internet and a minimum of knowledge of libraries. On the basis of this, user panels were selected, partly to outline the requirements for user interface and search facilities. The panels consisted of people of different ages, people in employment, unemployed people, pensioners, women and men. The end user’s - and not the professional user’s (the librarian’s) - wishes and demands in relation to the system have therefore been the most important aspect.
 |
| The bibliotek.dk simple search screen |
The fundamental idea has always been that bibliotek.dk must be accessible to everyone. The Web pages have also been tested for accessibility for the visually impaired in mind and a user interface in English has also been developed [2].
The bibliotek.dk concept stresses the fact that it is the individual user who chooses the material he/she wants and also the place of collection, i.e. the library where the user wants to pick up the actual, ordered material. But the user doesn’t choose the library to deliver the material. It is the library system which makes sure, in the most rational and economical way, that the material ordered is procured for the place of collection, in most cases the library chosen as place of collection does not itself hold the material in question.
Each library determines its own service profile within the frames of the library act. This means for example that music materials, CD-ROMs etc. belong to the group of obligatory material, which will not be compulsory or included in the interlibrary loan co-operation until after 1 January 2003. Video format is not obligatory material for public libraries either, so a library can decide not to loan this material to inhabitants of other municipalities. Each research library has their primary users and a lot of the libraries have different rules for different groups of users.
It also means that the each library in bibliotek.dk has described in precise terms their service, which is offered to the user. Questions about searching and description of books, periodicals, music etc. as well as assistance in using bibliotek.dk must therefore be directed at the individual user’s local library. Questions about the individual requisition must be directed at the library which the user has chosen as place of collection.
 |
| The bibliotek.dk search results screen |
A number of Danish libraries have both individually and in teams developed a number of net services. The services, which are of a national character, are included with the list of links on the front page of bibliotek.dk. A few examples of these net services include:
Users can search on bibliotek.dk on three levels: simple search, advanced search and a blank CCL-screen. After choosing a title, the user must choose a library to collect the material from. The user doesn’t have to select a library to get the material from – only where to collect it.
This means that one can search on all registered books, articles, CDROMs and other materials, acquired in Danish libraries. There is in total more than 7 million titles, covering several million types of materials.
In the development of bibliotek.dk no particular technological demands were placed on the participating libraries. Existing library systems were therefore, supposed to be able to be used without further immediate technological requirements and subsequent economic consequences.
The libraries receive requisitions from bibliotek.dk in the form of an e-mail (with human-readable text or structured information) and in a Web based database. Each library chooses its own mode of receipt, which might be different for requisitions from the library’s own holdings and potential interlibrary loan requisitions.
From the Web based database a user’s requisition is then processed by a single click, the service is a very efficient tool. The requisition is then moved to the lending library via a mailbox.
In late March and April 2001 an information campaign promoting library services was carried out. A major part of the campaign concentrated on bibliotek.dk. The campaign consisted of:
At the same time it became possible to send your comments to the site, and many people responded very quickly even though the mechanism was not highly promoted. Some messages were passed on to the local library, while others just expressed how pleased they were with the new system. Overall we have received several hundred comments of praise from users and only a few negative comments. Here are a few examples:
“I have been wondering for a long time whether it wouldn’t be possible to search in a common library database, and now it is – and you can even order the materials at the same time.”
“Great!!! I haven’t tried to order any books yet, but if you keep your promises, well then this is a truly brilliant tool. I have tried a couple of different searches, and am impressed. It works very well!”
“It is simply PERFECT!”
As anticipated the number of requisitions made when bibliotek.dk first opened was not very impressive. The figures for the entire period since bibliotek.dk opened in late 2000 until the end of August 2001 is nearly 200,000 requests from users of public libraries and about 30,000 requests from users of research libraries.
In April 2001 simultaneous with the campaign there was a total of about 38,500 requisitions, the distribution was just over 33,000 from public libraries and just under 5,000 from research libraries.
By far the majority of requisitions are in fact for interlibrary loans. This has been established partly from bibliotek.dk statistics and partly from the fact that a number of the larger research libraries have experienced a marked increase in the number of requisitions from the public libraries. A major part of English-language literature has in fact only just become visible to the man in the street, and this has quite clearly resulted in a growing demand.
Without a doubt bibliotek.dk has increased the number of requisitions in the libraries –this is particularly true in the case of the public libraries. What the result will be as regards for example an increase in loans and interlibrary loans we can only say for certain when we have the statistical figures for 2001.
But one thing is absolutely certain – the traditional materials such as books, periodicals etc. will remain central for many years to come. During the further development of bibliotek.dk the emphasis will therefore be on processing and executing so-called user initiated interlibrary loan requisitions as rationally and economically as possible.
Since the launching of bibliotek.dk a number of improvements have taken place and an extensive action plan is now available which includes several functionality developments. Improved services for the user is the key and all development initiatives will be based on this premise.
In the case of some libraries requests for materials owned by the library itself have been transferred to the local library system. The request is re-directed from bibliotek.dk to the local system for direct checking in the local system’s stock whereupon the local procedure for requests moves into operation. It is also possible to re-direct from local system for an immediate search in bibliotek.dk without having to key in again.
It is now possible for the user to save his borrower’s identification etc. so that it won’t be necessary to key this in at each request.
A well-known problem with National Union Catalogues is that one cannot make a complete matching so that the same edition of the same title is always gathered into one registration. With access for everyone this problem has become even more topical. The Danish Bibliographic Centre has been working on this and by doing a new match run in March 2001 it was able to remove 1,1 million duplicates from the system and combine them with other records in the database. Another matching will be done later this year, which is expected to remove at least another 100,000 duplicates.
The continuous development of bibliotek.dk is carried out with a view to improve the possibilities for the user of bibliotek.dk. We maintain that a simple user interface is most important and very advanced facilities, which cannot be used by the ordinary user, are not on the cards.
The purpose of developing bibliotek.dk can be divided into:
Some headlines of the newest version of the development plan of late June 2001 are discussed below.
A so-called ‘work presentation’ is under preparation. It is based on IFLA’s [9] Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records to collect several editions of the same work and present them together to the user – both in the search and presentation phase. If a title, for example, has several editions, the user is supposed to only experience one hit and one inclusive presentation. He can then view directly the division into editions or click his way to view detailed information.
Subject retrieval has been given high priority in bibliotek.dk. Unfortunately quite a lot of older titles have no subject headings attached and have therefore ‘disappeared’ from many users. These titles often have one or more classification codes, but this is not really the kind of information which is most useful to the end user. So the job is to generate subject headings from classifications in order to create more subject access points to the records in the database.
Another way of using the classification system as a subject access point is to create an alphabetical browser hierarchy based on the Danish decimal classification system DK-5. The idea is to use the verbal description of a subject group for representations on the screen, starting by presenting the 10 main groups. By selecting one of these, the appropriate sub-groups will be shown. The final design has not been worked out yet, but the emphasis is not going to be on a formal rendering of the system.
In the early autumn 2001 the Danish Bibliographic Centre will make a proposal for an import format based on Dublin Core with some extensions to manage ownership, changes etc. of the records.
As an extra service to the users it will be possible to view holdings registrations using Z39.50 from any library. Information about whether the material is on loan is particularly useful and you will also be told the expected time of delivery if the material is not on the shelves.
The improved match and development of ‘work presentation’ mentioned above would also mean a rationalisation of the libraries’ work. At the moment quite a lot of time is spent on sorting through potential interlibrary loan requests in order to provide another edition, which is actually available in the library in question.
From the libraries’ point of view, one of the weak points is that at the moment it is not possible to check before accepting a request whether the local library knows the user. The only validation available is checking whether a personal identification number meets the formal requirements. The development of borrower check from bibliotek.dk to local system is therefore high on the agenda.
Today requests to another library generated from bibliotek.dk are sent via the DanBib mailbox. As there actually is a library system which is just about ready to receive ILL requests carried via Z39.50 in XML format, bibliotek.dk will soon be able to send information in this way. The great advantage is that the local library system will be updated automatically and the requesting library will be told automatically whether the material is available. It would facilitate the manual process when receiving requests from other libraries considerably.
The primary objective with bibliotek.dk is of course to present the libraries’ service to the citizens. But this should not be perceived as a ‘straitjacket’. There are several areas where the information in bibliotek.dk can be used as the basis for development of a further number of services to the user. It does not really matter whether the libraries are the suppliers – the all-important thing is that the citizen is given a better service.
Central in this context is the so-called ”Available for sale” button. It is up to the user to decide whether he wants to order a title from the library or whether he would prefer to buy it. When the user has indicated that he wants a certain title, he will be offered the choice between ordering or buying, if there are booksellers who have the title in stock. If the user wants to buy, s/he is shown a list of possible suppliers with prices and terms of delivery. S/he then chooses the relevant supplier and is transferred to the appropriate Web site.
The supplier must deliver a file with data of the titles available from him. The plan is that via a robot up to date information will be collected each night from each supplier. It will be a simple file format with ISBN, price and terms of delivery. We expect to be able to provide this function during the autumn/winter 2001.
Initially it will be possible to buy books, but other types of material will follow later, music CDs probably being first in line.
Improvements and rationalisations for the libraries will obviously be high on the agenda. Both in bibliotek.dk and in DanBib, which is still the professional tool of library staff.
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Leif Andresen
Library Advisory Officer
Danish National Library Authority
Nyhavn 31 E, DK-1051 Copenhagen K
Denmark
Phone: +45 3373 3354
Fax: +45 3373 3372
Leif Andresen's responsibilities at the Danish National Library Authority include the National Union Catalogue, National Bibliography and standardisation e.g. metadata and Z39.50.
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For citation purposes:
Andresen, L. "bibliotek.dk - a New Route to Danish Libraries", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/danish/>
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By Ingrid Cantwell - October 2001
The general goal of the ELVIL project 2000 [1] is to create and operate a Portal to European Law and Politics and provide tools to facilitate the accessibility of public information in the European public sphere. Ingrid Cantwell of Stockholm University Library outlines the three main problem areas (access, learning and communication within European law and politics) the project is currently dealing with.
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The ELVIL application increases the availability of information by integrating a wide range of legislative computer based resources using the Z39.50 protocol and by supplying a point-and-click graphical interface. The intended users of the site consists of graduate and undergraduate students, teachers, librarians, media and the general public. The tools developed and experiences gained in the project will be further exploited in the ELVIL nexus. The chief objective of nexus is to work towards an increased openness and accessibility of the European public sphere by promoting the idea of the nexus civic network (ncn). This will be achieved by licensing the ELVIL nexus publishing tools as well as by running a central Web site, which will act as the central node of the network. By signing on to a nexus partner-program, organisations agree on enhancing their existing Web sites with the nexus publishing tools. The resulting nexus civic network can be conceived as a decentralised information- and knowledge-producing network institutionally based in the European civil society. It will thus strengthen the possibilities for the ELVIL 2000 platform to become a main provider of public information as well as a main resource for refining and adding value to such information. The experiences and results of the project will also be exploited by the participant partners in different ways.
The project has produced software gateways to the parliamentary databases of the Czech Republic and Poland. The prototype gateway for Rixlex, Polis and Epoque (Epoque is no longer an operational database, it has been relaced by EUROParl) developed in the ELVIL project is included in the portal. The software support package developed within the project will facilitate the inclusion of a large number of parliamentary databases in the future by shortening development time and reducing cost. Multilingual support can further be provided by using EUROVOC as a language switchboard to the different national thesauri.
The ELVIL 2000 project has used technologies exploiting the concept of Autonomous agents to aid both users and administrators in identifying high quality Web-resources on European law and Politics.
The project has explored the potentials of electronic democracy by building an electronic democracy platform where current legislative issues can be debated by selected groups of users in a structured manner. By the project´s development of support packages for interest groups it will be easy for groups to form deliberative fora structured around the available information in the ELVIL 2000 platform.
Accessibility to information on European Law and Politics has been further facilitated by new educational modules covering the Catalan (as examples of regional polities), as well as The Czech and Polish polities (as examples of CEE polities) at a detailed level. A number of other countries in Europe has been dealt with at a more summarized level. A prototype is available at online.
The ELVIL project started from a real felt need. On the floor of Stockholm University Library when teaching students of politics we saw the need to enforce and extend pedagogic methods outside the classroom and on to the Web. We also saw the need and possibilities to facilitate the access to European law and politics to students and the general public and the opportunity to work for a closer integration of the study of law and politics on the Web.
In 1995 a project group with members from the Department of Politics, the Law Faculty, the Library and the Swedish Parliament was formed to write a proposal for a project to the Telematics, Library Programme of the European Commission. The ELVIL project was finished in July 1999 and the current ELVIL 2000 is a continuation project to ELVIL.
The consortium working with ELVIL 2000 is Stockholm University as co-ordinating partner, De Montfort University and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. The Swedish Parliament and its library is a partner providing the Swedish parliamentary database and taking part in the development. Context in London provides Polis, the English Parliament´s database and the European Parliament provides EPOQUE for the project. Libraries involved in the project are Stockholm University Library, the Swedish Parliamentary Library, Örebro Public Library, and libraries of Diputacio de Barcelona. New parliament partners in the ELVIL 2000 project are the Parliament of the Czech Republic and the Sejm, the Polish Parliament. New library partners are Stockholm Public Library and the Library of the European Commission.
So in the project, funded by the European Commission, universities, libraries, publishers and parliaments worktogether to make European law and politics easily accessible for the citizens and students of Europe.
ELVIL is addressing three distinct user groups: citizens in general, teacher/students, media and professionals, all in need of:
The development of tools for communication, collaboration and debating on the WWW in close integration with easy access to parliamentary documentation and multimedia educational tools offers a unique potential for developing new means for citizen participation.
In this article I will concentrate on the three main problem areas in the ELVIL project: access, learning and communication within European law and politics.
ELVIL has developed access to a number of the most important databases within the field. In the centre are parliamentary databases. In the prototype we work with Rixlex, The Swedish Parliament´s database, Polis, the database of the House of Commons, Epoque the database of the European parliament (only a subset of Epoque which is no longer an operational database) and the Czech and Polish parliamentary databases.
These databases differ in that they reflect the different traditions of parliamentary procedures, they differ in database format, search interface and hardware, but they can now be searched in the same way due to the Z39.50 gateway that was developed in the ELVIL project. The standard used for mapping the databases is GILS (Government Information Locator Service).
You can search each database separately or you can do a comparative search in several databases. You can follow a debate in for instance Rixlex, have your search question translated and search the English database to see how the issue was treated in the English parliament and finally go to EPOQUE and see how the question was dealt with in the European Parliament
The pragmatic goal of ELVIL is thus to provide a single, WWW-based user interface to these databases. For this the Z39.50 protocol was chosen. Arriving at a common model for representing the contents of the participating databases has been one of the major challenges facing the project, while a the same time being vital to its long-term success. The notion of creating a unified interface to the national parliamentary databases rests on the assumption that their contents are similar enough in nature that such a common model can be found. During the course of the project, this assumption was put to the test. It has turned out that the task of finding a common reference model which can at least partially express the contents of all parliamentary databases is a difficult one. Although the contents and similar semantic concepts can be compared between the databases, the field and database structure and parliamentary practice is so different, so that only a few fields can be used in the parallell search. Thus making the ELVIL format useful for a general search.
It is obvious that ELVIL cannot hope to arrive at a model extensive enough to encompass all parliamentary databases - not even those participating in the pilot study. To improve interoperability, ELVIL has attempted to find a common subset of fields and categories that are reasonably generic across the selected databases.
During the course of ELVIL 2000, the process of adding new resources, and executing the phases described above, have been formalised into a “cookbook” or guide to new implementors. The cookbook gathers information relevant to ELVIL virtual library resource developers in a single place, in attempt to simplify the process of doing this. The guidelines can be downloaded from the ELVIL 2000 home-page, together with guidelines for other ELVIL 2000 development.
Linguistic problems are obvious and not easily solved when trying to retrieve documents in the European languages. We have chosen to implement a language switch board which acts as an aid when searching across several languages. A Swedish user can search in Swedish in Polis, Epoque and the Czech and Polish databases. EUROVOC, the thesaurus originally created by the European Parliament and now under the umbrella of the Office of European Publications, was chosen as a basis for this language switch-board. EUROVOC is ideal for this method as it exists in all the languages of the member countries.
The mapping between the national parliaments thesauri and EUROVOC has by no means been straightforward. The EUROVOC thesaurus is a high-level thesaurus and just as the national parliamentary databases reflect the legal tradition procedures, the Anglo-Saxon and the Continental, so do the thesauri associated with them. There is certainly no question of a ”one-to-one” match in the majority of the terms.
The database of the switch board at the moment consists of 21.000 terms. A special software has been written for the different thesauri and the software will be standardised to be compatible with all the languages of the member countries of the European Union. The ISO standard has been followed but slightly adjusted as it did not fulfil the need of truly multilingual thesauri according to our linguistic experts in the project.
Another important way of access in ELVIL is the Web-index. The www-index is a quality controlled index on European law and politics, consisting of around 1.500 records with an URL linked to the actual source. The records in the index-database is constructed according to the metadata standard Dublin Core, and the EUROVOC thesaurus is used for subject access here as in the rest of the ELVIL system.
An extended search among documents on European law and politics can be executed through the Harvester set up in ELVIL. The search robot is pointed at the homepages of the main organisations in Europe and three links down. The Web-index is thus a searchable database, we have however seen the benefit of constructing two subsets of the index:
To help users access the information and formulate questions the ELVIL 2000 project has developed a Virtual Librarian. An important strand within this work is to use techniques of artificial intelligence (such as intelligent agents and fuzzy logic) to improve the interaction between users and these information sources
It was felt that this would be particularly useful because:
The Virtual Librarian uses user modelling - to gather information about each individual user's requirements and experience; a problem-solving methodology called fuzzy logic - to infer what type of information a user is looking for; and a "database advisor" rulebase - which can recommend the most appropriate sources of information to the user.
Knowledge on selection of databases and search strategies was gathered from the relevant experts in the ELVIL2000 team. A first prototype was produced using Xpert Rule (a knowledge-base development tool). Xpert Rule supported rapid development, which meant that feedback could be obtained from project partners and various design issues could beaddressed at an early stage.
The first prototype was then re-engineered, this time in Java, so that it could be integrated with the main ELVIL Web site.
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| Figure 1: The Virtual Librarian registration form |
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| Figure 2: Virtual Librarian - Search form |
The user types in terms he is looking for and the Virtual Librarian recommends the best information sources for this special user:
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| Figure 3: Virtual Librarian´s recommendations |
The user can, if s/he wishes see how his ”learning curve” proceeds as the system records the user´s previous usage of relevant ELVIL databases.
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| Figure 4: The learning curve |
The Virtual Librarian´s combination of user modelling and fuzzy logic to help users formulate queries is a novel approach to this aspect of information retrieval and we believe an extremely interesting development.
A fundamental idea in ELVIL is that one should not just be able to search for information but also be guided in the understanding of the democratic political procedures in Europe. To that effect we have implemented the ELVIL Encyclopedia. The articles in the Encyclopedia are written by lecturers from different universities.
In the Encyclopaedia ELVIL 2000 offers lectures on European law and politics and a Case-bank with cases on issues in the political life that have engaged people over the last few years.
The articles provide a general or abstract view of different aspects of the political system based on a set of concepts (the eight subjects) that are common for all polities, thus allowing for comparison. The cases will serve as empirical exemplifications of some of the concepts described in the articles. The cases are based on real life events and their documentation in public documents (taken from the parliamentary databases, when possible). They are designed to give the user a first-hand view on the political processes, in contrast to the more abstract view presented in the articles. Both articles and cases make use of several media formats (texts, images, animations etc.) to illustrate and explain legal and political processes.
Another pedagogical idea has been that users are more willing to learn if they can decide how and what to learn, which means that the users will get the possibility to construct their own picture of the political system. Here the idea was to build a highly interactive structure and to maintain a high degree of "granularity" in the learning modules. That means that the knowledge ought to be as subdivided as possible, in order for us to be able to present it in as many ways as possible to satisfy as many user needs as possible; and from the user’s point of view, it should be possible to follow each learning module (e.g. an article) independently of the other modules in the encyclopaedia.
At the moment there are detailed articles on the political and legal structure of Sweden, Spain, Catalan (as an examle of a region) Poland, the Czech Republic and the EU and.shorter articles on other countries in Europe.
The contents of articles are structured in the same way in all polities. That is: 1. History and Identity, 2. Main Constitutional Principles and Citizenship, 3. Civil society and systems of representation, 4. Key political and legal institutions, 5. Processes of Legislation, 6. Processes of Governance, 7. Processes of Adjudication, and 8. Public documentation.
The case method refers to the use of cases as educational vehicles to give learners an opportunity to put themselves in the decision maker's or problem solvers position. Through repeated personal analysis, definition of problem, identification of alternatives, statement of objectives and decision criteria, choice of action and plan for implementation, the learner gains an opportunity to develop analytical and planning skills in a laboratory setting. The virtual cases in ELVIL are based on these ideas.
The aim with using the case-method in ELVIL is to exemplify concepts in the articles, explain the political and legislative processes in general as well as to give the user an understanding about how legal and political documents in the databases are connected to (and can be interpreted in the light of) political life.
There are presently some twenty cases in the casebank covering real events and questions in political life that have engaged people over the last few years.
The third bearing idea in ELVIL is - Communication. ELVIL 2000 has implemented a platform for communication and collaboration. The idea is to try out a way of organizing forums that is both effective and participative; well prepared and successfully realized; centered on problem-solving and not only on analysis; with means that allow for preparation and long-distance participation.
The following table shows some examples of discussion forums within ELVIL and their classification within the ELVIL matrix:
| Promotion of innovative experiences | Design of new Rules | Presentation of new concepts | Alternative models of social organization | Collection of opinions | |
| International Politics | The European policy for innovation | An alternative model for the Maastricht Treaty | The United States of Europe | Europass: the plan to fight corruption | The neo extremisms |
| National Politics | Infoville: the application of telematics in Villena | Non-violent solutions for the Basque country | Representative & direct democracy | Representative & direct democracy | The Austrian liberal party |
| Conflicts resolution | Reconciliation model at Rwanda | Introducing mediation at
educational centres Defence 2001: exclusively defensive armies |
Digital referees | Solidarity with Chiapas to set the limits to the Neoliberalism | Custody of children after divorce |
| Social systems | Napster and the peer-to-peer solutions | Law legislation of homosexual partnerships | A sustainable ecological society | Welfare state | The aging of Europe and the immigration |
| Civil society | Solidary consumption networks and fair commerce | Public financing for civil organizations | Working groups of volunteers | Civil organization to control the
public expenditure Civil society control over the public TV |
Do you believe in NGOs? |
| Globalisation | Telework in foreign countries sitting at home | New laws for digital global
marketplaces Atom energy – prohibiton or legalisation for its future exploitation |
Global climate changes and their political consequences | Global minds and models | “Pro and con” of the economic globalisation |
The range of topics and objectives will be reviewed and modified according to the results of the demonstration phase in the project.
The project also selected and configured three independent Web-based platforms as the technical underlying infrastructure for the e-democracy platform. Among the all the criteria considered for their selection, it is worthy to mention the following two: their capacity for cooperative work and their capacity for creating debates. The selected platforms should guarantee at least one of the two.
The capacity for cooperative work provides users with the ability to create joint reports and share documentation. A concrete example would be the creation of cases or lectures by a group of experts. On the other hand, the capacity of creating debates provides users with the ability to create spaces where they can discuss and interchange ideas. The combination of both capacities provides users the ability to discuss and share or create documentation at the same time (eg: as a result of the discussion).
During the demonstration phase over 80 % of the users said they would probably or definitely access ELVIL services again. The encyclopaedia received the highest rating but all services received a rating above average. Looking at Web statistics we can see that last year there were around 70.000 visits to the ELVIL 2000 site. Looking at country statistics for September one can see that ELVIL 2000 is used globally. Mostly in Europé and The US but also in for instance South Africa, Korea, Japan, Bolivia, Malaysia, The Russian Federation…
ELVIL 2000 will be exploited as ELVIL nexus. It should be noted however that parallel exploitation at the individual project-sites of the ELVIL 2000 project is taking place as well.
The chief objective of nexus is to work towards an increased openness and accessibility of the European public sphere by promoting the idea of the nexus civic network (ncn). This will be achieved by licensing the nexus publishing tools as well as by running a central Web site, which will act as the central node of the network. By signing on to a nexus partner-program, organisations agree on enhancing their existing Web sites with the nexus publishing tools. The resulting nexus civic network can be conceived as a decentralised information- and knowledge-producing network institutionally based in the European civil society.
The core idea of nexus is that every piece of information or knowledge that is published with the nexus tools will be searchable and retrievable through any other nexus-enhanced site. Nexus would ideally expand in a Web-like manner as organisations enhance and integrate their Web sites with the nexus tools. The existing structures of non-profit knowledge- and information-production in Europe could thus be made more efficient. In other words, it would be possible to reap the benefits of an increased division of labour in the European public sphere. At the same time, the information and knowledge would be made more accessible to the general citizen.
Nexus will primarily be targeted to producers of non-licensed knowledge and information products, public information and so called "grey" literature in the European public sphere - in the following Information- and knowledge producing organisations (hereafter IKO's). The tools are designed to add value to already existing publishing activities in such organisations. Targeted organisations include the higher education and cultural sector, the civil society sector as well as the administrative sector. Crucial criteria for partner selection will be an academic ethos on information- and knowledge-management, dedication to the principles of rule of law, democratic process and constitutionalism and an explicit aim of producing information for the civic community on a national or European level.
Our aim is to successfully launch the nexus service into the European non-profit information market with appropriate public funding.
Nexus' general mission will be to work towards an increased openness and accessibility of the European public sphere by adding value - by promulgating the nexus tools - to already existing structures of knowledge- and information-production. The overriding strategy will be to provide non-profit software solutions targeted to civil society organisations that in their turn aim at adding value to available public information or alternatively aim at publishing educational material.
The purpose of nexus is:
The European Commission has identified the public sector as an information-producing sector of rank that could benefit the civic community if the information was made more widely available. However, all public spheres suffers from a crucial inhibiting fact. It is costly to produce high-quality civic information while users are reluctant to pay a high price for that kind of information. The combination of cost-intensive supply, and cost-sensitive demand can be called "the content-gap" of civic information. In the European public sphere, the "content-gap" is further reinforced by the prevailing linguistic plurality. These limitations inhibits the full potential of the European cultural economy as provider of civic information. While it is difficult to overcome the content-gap on a commercial basis, it is crucial to do so in order for a democratic public sphere to work.
The historical problem of providing civic information to a low cost, and thus overcome the "content-gap", has mainly been addressed by non-profit civil society organisations on a national level. Non-profit civil society organisations has based their knowledge production on alternate sources of funding, either as interest-organisations, party-organisations, or NGO's, and publishes in the form of publicly available journals, papers or reports.
The Internet has changed many of the underlying economic conditions of the cultural economy - mainly by decreasing the cost for distribution. However, the cost for production remains high and labour-intensive. This is the springing point for the Internet economy. While "content is king," - content costs. This is the main reason for the relatively slow progress of the Internet economy in the area of civic information.
Main Aim
The underlying logic is to "harvest" IKO's for papers, reports or databases that otherwise, because of the "content-gap" never would have made it to the commercial market - and thus would never have been published. The main goal of nexus will be to provide non-profit solutions to reduce the "content-gap", targeted for organisations in the civil society that wants to add value to public information or produce new knowledge that they wish to make public. The initial target institutions will be parliaments, libraries, universities and other public knowledge-producing institutions. The goal is to create a set of interconnected information nodes - something we choose to call a partner-nexus - in the European public sphere, maintained by civil society organisations, where information concerning European law and politics can be made available for free for the general public.
The ELVIL project has created a set of easy-to-use standardised publishing tools, built on open standards (Z39.50, XML and HTML), designed for low-cost and low-maintenance management. They should ideally be inserted in existing knowledge-production and publication lines, with the least possible effort on behalf of the knowledge-producing institutions. The resulting "partner-nexus" will automatically be connected to all other nodes, and all other sister-nodes will be searchable from one and the same node. One of the nodes will be the central nexus Web site witch will host a central server and an editorial office. The cost for maintaining the civic information and knowledge network will thus be distributed among the participating institutions.
The nexus tools have been constructed around the Z39.50 protocol and are fully integrated with the HTML-standard. Through the partner-program, existing IKO's in the European civil society can enhance their existing Web site with the nexus tools. The nexus tools include easy-to-use tools for publishing of databases (the Database gateways), tools for multi-lingual search and retrieve (the Language switch-board), tools for building specialised Web-indexes (the Web-index), tools for building specialised e-learning material (the Learning centre), and tools for building "virtual organisations" (the Electronic democracy platform -EDP). Since the nexus tools are built on open and compatible standards (primarily HTML and Z39.50), every new nexus-enhanced Web site will be compatible and shareable with any other nexus-site. The language switchboard ensures that all resources are searchable and indexable in all official European languages. When an organisation has enhanced its Web site with the nexus tools, it becomes an access-node for shared public information in the nexus network of civic information - as all nexus-enhanced Web sites are capable of sharing information with each other.
The central nexus Web site will provide a central access node for all the information made available by utilising the nexus tools and to make sure that the nexus tools work like an independent and relevant source of civic information for the general public in Europe. It will continue to run the gateways and indexes of the initial ELVIL-project and as new nexus-enhanced Web sites are made available online, those sources will be included. The central Web site will also feature an edited section, focused primarily on long-term themes in the European news-flow. The central editor will comment on current themes and supply relevant available in the nexus civic network - educational resources, documentary material as well as collections of relevant Web-links. Such resources would be collected and presented in special sections that over time would grow to become important background material for more intense analysis than what is permitted through the regular news-flow. The central nexus Web site would preferably become a natural second-stop for consumers of news, both individuals as well as organisations, that want to go beyond the immediate news to seek more perspectives and more background information.
Appealing Elements of ELVIL nexus:
It is envisaged that the central nexus Web site, with the existing content, can commence as soon as appropriate funding has been secured [2].
or Ingrid Cantwell, Stockholm University Library: ingrid.cantwell@sub.su.se
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Ingrid Cantwell
Stockholm University Library
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For citation purposes:
Cantwell, I. "ELVIL 2000: The European Legislative Virtual Library ", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/elvil/>
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By Susan Hazan - October 2001
Susan Hazan, the curator of new media for the Israel Museum based in Jerusalem attempts to answer the question “If the intrinsic experience of a museum is about its material collections, why would a museum even want an electronic surrogate?”
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If the intrinsic experience of a museum is about its material collections, why would a museum even want an electronic surrogate?
This is complex question that, much in the same way that museums around the world have been grappling with over the last decade, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem has been concerned with since the opening of the New Media Unit in 1991. We began to focus on electronic projects, identifying, visualizing and implementing new digital media incentives appropriate for the museum environment, and launched the first comprehensive Web site in 1995. The Web site [1] has since undergone three new re-designs with a fifth now under construction. An art or archeological museum is not about technological innovations, which perhaps may even be seen as an antithesis to the museum mandate, yet it has always been clear to our institution that there is much to gain from embracing new technologies to fulfill our institutional goals. Whether we are producing digital objects or artwork, electronic galleries or entire virtual museums, we need to question how this new augmented reality impacts the museum experience.
As a member if ICOM, The International Council of Museums, we adhere to the definition of a museum:
A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment [2].
Modifications of the ICOM Statutes were recently adopted by the General Assembly in Barcelona on Friday 6th July as (viii) cultural centres and other entities that facilitate the preservation, continuation and management of tangible or intangible heritage resources (living heritage and digital creative activity).
This modification clearly brings into focus the realization that museums are as much about digital creativity as well as the historical mandate of preserving, exhibiting and interpretation of material collections. This article is not about a specific technology or innovative interface, rather it describes how our institution has learned to engage with virtual objects, on-line educational activities and electronic surrogates, in order to extend the museums’ holdings beyond the walls of the museum experience.
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| The Shrine of the Book, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem |
The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, perhaps best known for the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, includes permanent collections ranging from prehistoric archaeology through contemporary art. It is the leading cultural institution in Israel and is one of the largest encyclopedic museums in the world, annually presenting a full roster of temporary exhibitions, publications [3], and educational activities. Its terraced complex, comprising nearly 50,000 square meters and a six-acre sculpture garden within its twenty-acre campus attracts over 800,000 visitors each year, about a third of them international tourists and including nearly 100,000 children in the educational programs at its Youth Wing. The Museum is committed to the preservation, study and display of its collections, fosters education for its public from within Israel and abroad, utilizing its extensive holdings of the world's pre-eminent collection of the archaeology of the Holy Land, the world's most comprehensive collections of Judaica and the ethnology of the Jewish people around the world and its fine art holdings from Old Masters in European Art through international contemporary art.
Perhaps the greatest challenge that any museum faces is digitizing its collections, whether they are for curatoral or scholastic research, as a provision of contextual information for the museum visitors or in an interpretation of the collections for remote visitors online.
Based on a lexicon that has been personally developed, each object is called up in parallel windows in the same screen and can be accessed, and edited in both languages. The lexicon was constructed from legacy terms that have been used in the museum for the last 30 years. Being a bilingual lexicon the terms are found in English and Hebrew in parallel tables that may be easily accessed while working on the database.
For a museum such as the Israel Museum, this is a formidable challenge, not only for the sheer quantity of its holdings but also in that the digital archive is fully searchable in both Hebrew and English. Allison Kupietzky, Collections Database Manager, [4] has risen to this challenge with a passion. According to Kupietzky, the lexicon was constructed from legacy terms that have been used in the museum for the last 30 years. Functioning as a bilingual lexicon the terms are found in English and Hebrew in parallel tables that may be easily accessed while working on the database. While this is a project that she and her team will be dedicated to for many years to come, some 7,000 objects have already been entered into the database. Once this project has been fully realized, the database will continue to provide the resources for new digital activities across the museum that rely first and foremost on their digital surrogate.
Amongst the complex of galleries and material collections, information kiosks in the galleries and computerized study rooms add a further dimension to the museum experience, providing the contextual information that serves to compliment and enhance the gallery experience.
The Study Center for Israeli Art [5] provides comprehensive information on thousands of Israeli artists, including painters, sculptors, photographers, designers - both graphic and industrial, architects, ceramists, jewelers, and all related arts and crafts. The archive includes biographic notes, press cuttings, videos, slides and photographs of works of art part of which can be accessed online [6]. A second study room, The Information Center for Judaica and Jewish Ethnography [7], enables the general public, students and researchers to access the Museum’s collection of Jewish ceremonial objects via a multi-level multimedia program enabling the viewing of a first analysis of over 300 objects within two main themes: The Life Cycle and The Cycle of the Jewish Year [8]. Two miniature manuscripts, illuminated treasures from eighteenth-century Vienna are currently on special exhibition in the Judaica galleries and are examples of the fine arts of calligraphy and illumination. To complement this exhibit an electronic version of the tiny pages allows visitors to "leaf through" the two manuscripts and enlarge them for closer study. While in reality this clearly would be obviously harmful to the artifacts, the electronic versions afford a compelling opportunity for visitors to engage with the objects in a meaningful and satisfying way [9].
As new temporary exhibitions regularly make their debut in the museum, both information kiosks and special sections of the museums website are designed, to augment the collections and to provide further depth to the museum experience. This year, the New Media Unit developed four such online exhibits in Hebrew and in English for both local and remote visitors. It's About Time, an exhibition on time for the whole family, afforded a special challenge as it was not easy to present an abstract concept that touches every part of our lives yet, for most of us remains vague and mysterious. "What will happen in a thousand years?" we asked some children. "Well, I'm sure I'll have a husband and children by then," one nine-year-old girl answered us [10]. The electronic surrogate of this exhibition for those visitors unable to come to the museum was presented as a Quick Time walk-through of the Youth Wing galleries [11].
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| Screenshot from the Quick Time "it's About Time" Youth Wing Exhibition |
Dreaming with Open Eyes" a comprehensive exhibition of the Vera, Silvia and Arturo Schwarz Collection of Dada and Surrealist Art [12] opened on December 22, 2000 and included over 300 works by leading artists including Duchamp, Man Ray, Ernst, Breton, and Goya. Paintings, drawings, sculptures, ready-mades, photographs, and prints were complemented by unique items from the Museum's Dada and Surrealist library of art periodicals, documents, letters, and artists' books. Clearly some objects make their screen debuts more successfully than others. While prints, paintings and photographs are intrinsically formats that work well on the screen, installations, sculptures and time-based artworks are far more difficult to represent as digital surrogates.
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| Kay Sage, The Upper Side of the Sky, 1944 From "Dreaming with Open Eyes |
Written in the Stars: Art and Symbolism of the Zodiac; [13] opened on March, 2001 illustrating the origins of the Zodiac and its place in Western culture traced through ancient mosaics, illuminated manuscripts, ceremonial objects, and the fine arts.
Perhaps the most exciting exhibition for the Israel Museum this year was China, One Hundred Years of Treasures [14], which is the first exhibition of masterpieces from the People's Republic of China ever held in Israel. It affords a view of rare and priceless works of art spanning over 5,000 years up to the eighteenth century, tracing China's crowning achievements in bronze, jade, ceramics, porcelain, and gold and silver. Some of our visitors have already used the website to learn about the collection before the visit while others can read more about the collections in much the same way as they would have with a catalog of the collection, but for countless others, the web visit may be the only way some visitors have of experiencing this extraordinary collection of treasures from China.
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| Hair ornament in the form of a horse's
head with antlers Six Dynasties, Northern Wei period, 386-534 CE From China, One Hundred Years of Treasures |
The artworks in this exhibition come from twelve provinces throughout China, and were chosen for their beauty as well as for their significance in the context of their time. Most of the objects came from tombs, which serve as a kind of time capsule containing precious information about life and death in ancient times. They reveal what the aristocracy of each period prized in life and chose to take with them into the afterlife.
The wing that have harnessed new technologies with most enthusiasm is the Youth Wing, the education department of the Israel Museum. According to Nurit Shilo-Cohen, Chief Curator of The Ruth Youth Wing:
“Being intrinsically people- rather than object-oriented, the Youth Wing has, in the past few years endeavors to bring the Museum closer to the diverse communities visiting it and to make it increasingly 'user friendly,' enabling everyone to feel more at home. This approach takes a variety of forms, including orientation maps, leaflets for visitors to exhibitions, gallery talks, with the realization that our young visitors, the present generation of children was born into an age of videos, computers, fax machines, MTV, and other new modes of communication”.
The Youth Wing is renown for its didactic, and interactive, thematic exhibitions and shares its experience with colleagues from all over the world in exhibition exchange and through presentations at international conferences such as the Network of Children’s Museums, Hands-on-Europe [15]. Web sites presentations and electronic activities, merely a click away, foster productive exchanges with colleagues and sister institutions and new shared spaces. With a long tradition of engaging visitors in the exhibits and with a sense that the museum experience is as much about 'minds on' as 'hands on', the Youth Wing has developed numerous interactive projects both in the gallery and online.
In 1996 the museum opened up a video window onto one of its major exhibition, "Children of the World Draw Jerusalem at 3000", the Youth Wing [16]. A multimedia station was set up in the gallery, staffed by high school students from our Multimedia Education Unit to assist the gallery visitors in three separate activities, to play a specially designed game for the exhibition, to view the online galleries that augmented the material collections and to encourage the visitors to take on an active role in video conferencing. We soon found that our real life visitors did not need much coaxing and were delighted to become instant players on our electronic stage. We selected the program CU-SeeMe, a simple and intuitive program developed by Cornell University and for eight hours a day, for six weeks, we were able to extend some part of the museum experience beyond the museum walls.
Through on-line quests, inter-school projects and competitions, and the direct and active of involvement of students, teachers, and families with curators and museum staff, the Israel Museum has brought the Museum to School [17] via an interactive and dynamic web site for students, teachers and their families. Until recently, out-reach museum educational activities were associated with traditional media delivery; brochures, kits and video, providing information for the pre-museum visit and an opportunity to take a little something back to the home or classroom after the visit. Internet delivery of educational material can add a further dimension - interactivity.
While it is fairly simple to translate educational print and video material into the www environment, the real challenge for museum educators lies in their ability to create a link between the school and the museum, between student and student, from school to school and from the home to the school. The Youth Wing designed an interactive school program, The Museum @School, based on the 3D virtual exhibition, 'The Light of the Menorah' [18], a photo realistic 3D gallery tour, streamed at 15 frames per second over standard dial-up modems with embedded 3D-hyper links enabling students to interact with the movie. This is an adaptation of a major temporary exhibition at the Israel Museum, 'In the Light of the Menorah: Story of a Symbol' which traced the manifold incarnations and interpretations of the seven-branched candelabrum, from Biblical sacred object to national emblem, as represented in objects from the extensive Museum's collections of archaeology, Judaica, and the fine arts, and through icons from institutions world wide. This offered an opportunity to devise new and exciting activities, incorporating the real time interactive component.
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| Screen shots from the'The Light of the Menorah'a photo realistic 3D gallery tour |
The Dead Sea Scrolls, and activities of the Shrine of the Book, perhaps the most visited galleries in the Israel Museum, yet again provided a compelling cultural message that is pushing the parameters of ‘old’ new technologies. Educational activities at The Shrine of the Book include both traditional and contemporary pedagogic methodology that illustrates the manuscripts and their compelling aesthetic presence. In order to explore new avenues to disseminate the cultural and spiritual messages, the Israel Museum in partnership with the Politecnico di Milano are researching an innovative digital platform to reach out to local and international visitors across the World Wide Web. While still in an early stage of development, the online virtual reality environment, will present a shared 3D space for visitors to visit the Shrine of the Book and the exhibits while interacting with each other is groups under the direction of a trained guide. This will provide a compelling experience for the visitors to take part in a real-time discussion on the Dead Sea Scrolls, evaluate the manuscripts and supporting collections while activating exhibits as they go.
This was recently presented as a full paper at ICHIM 2001 [19], Milan, Italy, as From the First Millennium to the Third, the Content is the Message! [20]
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| CAD rendering of the Shrine of the Book |
September, 28, 2001, the Youth Wing is launching a new thematic exhibition, Hands. We use our hands to touch, feel, "see", create, and connect; our hands are our ambassadors to the outer world - the mediators between ourselves and our surroundings. As such, they have generated a host of beliefs, customs, and images in various cultures and throughout the ages. These are illustrated through games, activities, films, artworks, and objects in the Youth Wing's interactive exhibition. This exhibition affords new opportunities to integrate new technologies in the interactive gallery experience and several activities have been especially designed for our visitors. For remote visitors this will be translated into online activities on the Web site – so bookmark this page!!! [21].
The Israel Museum has a strong tradition of exchanging exhibits with sister institutions across the world as well as full exhibitions. Drink and be Merry: Wine and Beer in Ancient Times, was exhibited in 2000 both in New York and in Italy and this year, a number of archeology collections will be traveling to locations in Europe. In 2001, the museum is sending exhibits to Sacred Foods, Bread, Wine and Oil in the Ancient Mediterranean to be hosted at the Museu d’Historia de la Cuitat in Barcelona, and El Toro I la Mediterrania at the Centre de Cultura Sa Nostra: Salamanca, Centro Cultrual Caja Duero in Palma de Mallorca.
The list is too long to be included here, but for visitors to the Israel Museum who are unable to see the material collections with their own eyes, we are proud of our virtual objects, on-line educational activities and electronic surrogates, which serve to extend the museums’ holdings beyond the walls of the museum experience. Perhaps the question that engages us so often while designing these electronic experiences is whether we produce experiences that are so satisfying that visitors are satiated by their virtual visit, or that they indeed serve to whet their appetite and entice our visitors to come to the real museum, to see the material collections with their own eyes, and bring the kids!!!
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Susan Hazan
Curator of New Media
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
shazan@imj.org.il
http://www.imj.org.il/
Phone: 972 55 550686
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For citation purposes:
Hazan, S. "The Israel Museum and the Electronic Surrogate", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/israel/>
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By Thibault Heuzé - October 2001
Thibault Heuzé describes current innovation opportunities available for the information community via CORDIS [1], the European Commission’s Research and Development Information Service. CORDIS provides easy access to a wealth of information about exploitable research results, funding opportunities as well as background information on all European research programmes. The author also emphasizes the importance still given to library communities in the upcoming Sixth Framework Programme and the fledging European Research Area.
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European institutions are currently debating on the future of European research. The notions of interconnectivity, convergence and mobility are at the center of most of these reflections. In this respect, the importance of libraries in the European Community, both as a major force in the information market and as intermediaries to knowledge and culture, is acknowledged.
Libraries were featured as a key field for research and development in earlier European-funded research programmes. Different types of projects were founded to foster interoperability and access. The underlying goal was to help modern libraries provide a dynamic and easily searchable information space throughout the Community taking into account existing geographical discrepancies.
By adopting the eEurope Action Plan in 2000 [2], the European Council has stressed again the importance given to memory institutions (libraries, museums, archives), who are part of the inclusive knowledge-based economy to be enhanced.
CORDIS, the European Commission’s Research and Development Information Service (DG Enterprise) offers key information on the privileged relationship between memory institutions and European research. The Web service enables users to overview exploitable research results, have access to current funding opportunities and better understand on-going projects. And last but not least, the service acts as a platform for the different existing networks [3] to interact and fully participate in the debate on the European Research Area (ERA) and forthcoming research programmes.
Considering the long-term support of European research to the information community, many exploitable results are coming to fruition [4].
CORDIS has developed a specific interactive service to highlight exploitable results. The Technology Marketplace service [5] offers a selection of the most recent and promising results in three domains: Science, Business and Society. Due to the service strong link between research achievements and the citizens’ benefit a selection of library management-related technologies is available.
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| The Technology Marketplace |
Currently several offers can be consulted, including initiatives on monitoring library economics in Europe, electronic cataloguing leading libraries into the future, and single access to libraries around the world.
The first project is using the Internet to develop a continuously updated database of statistics on library activities and associated costs, in the context of their national economics. An on-going study covers the activities of libraries in 29 countries and offers internationally comparable data. The second project supports the next generation of language platforms designed to address specific functional difficulties in electronic access to library databases and catalogues with the intention to digitise Public Libraries into a network of compatible data, regardless of the differences in cataloguing practices. Finally, the third project covers an innovative tool enabling both librarians and end-users to access resources in libraries scattered around the world, through a single contact point. Services offered include inter-loans, multimedia document delivery, as well as collaborative cataloguing and record supply [6].
More results are available from the frequently updated Technology Marketplace service as well as from the CORDIS Results service [7]. In spite of previous projects that are relevant for technology transfer, the latest projects under the “multimedia content and tools” of the IST programme [8] offer even more innovative solutions.
Various funding opportunities exist under the current European research programmes. Library managers and related organisations can propose new research projects under actions such as “systems and services for the citizen” (IST, key action 1 [9]), “multimedia content and tools” (IST, key action 3 [10]) or “the city of tomorrow and cultural heritage” (EESD, key action 4 [11]). Moreover, there are other opportunities in the fields of education and life-long learning, e-learning and entertainment.
Memory institutions will pay special attention to the funding allocated to the “digital heritage and cultural content”, which aims to improve access to patrimony and stimulate cultural development. All information related to this area is hosted on CORDIS, including related calls, background information, descriptions of selected projects [12], news and events.
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| The DIGICULT Web site |
Issues regarding access to content, collaborative cataloguing, gateways to library systems, virtual exhibitions in museums, new standards, storage facilities, digital content and publishing, on-line publications and multilingualism: are all being addressed through the development of innovative technologies. On-going research projects deal with new approaches and potential results for spin off project. They can easily be reviewed to gain a better insight on the type of funding opportunities and latest trends helping plan further research projects [13].
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| The IST Web site |
In addition, innovative projects can be proposed through the eContent programme [14]. This programme aims at supporting the production, dissemination and use of European digital content and to promote linguistic diversity on the global networks.
The eContent programme is based on three main strands of action:
1. Improving access to and expanding use of public sector information
2. Enhancing content production in a multilingual and multicultural environment
3. Increasing dynamism of the digital content market
This programme therefore covers library-related actions. Following a first call for proposals issued in 15th of March 2001, a selection of projects is already available on the service. One example of a relevant project is the PSINET (Public Sector Information Network) [15]. This project led by the Essex County Council Libraries is supporting the overall aim to explore and demonstrate the commercial potential of Europe's Public Sector Information resources in digital Content products and services through cross-border, public/private partnerships [16].
CORDIS provides assistance and tools to help potential participants understand procedures and participate in funding opportunities [17]. All the critical stages from the identification of funding opportunities to partner search [18] and electronic submission are covered by the service. A specific FP5 Web service also gathers all information about the Framework programme and specific programmes.
What will be the funding opportunities and research objectives in the future programmes?
A quick visit to CORDIS can provide useful background information as well as official reports on the preparation of the European Research Area. The library and information community will remain an essential target to stimulate a greater use of information and exchange as well as to valorise e-learning initiatives.
In this respect, the proposed thematic programmes of the forthcoming Framework programme 2002-2006 [19] mentions “Information Society Technologies”, including applied IST research addressing societal and economic challenges, as well as a new heading “citizens and governance in European society”.
The European Commission has organised different debates [20] to enable mainly non-profit sector organisations to channel their views on the future of research. The room given to the citizens within the eEurope initiative is also an element supporting the key role of the information community. Building on previous successful projects and research initiatives, this network can fully participate in yet further developments in Europe. The present societal and ethical approaches of European funded research strongly recognise the importance of themes and challenges associated to information management.
To get the full picture of the work on the next Framework Programme, all the current debate, official documents and external groups’ positions can be found on a dedicated service: “RTD beyond 2002” [21]. This service features information on the European Research Area developments and actions and new priorities and policy initiatives for the next Framework Programme. Additional information can be found on the CORDIS Belgian Presidency Research and Innovation service. One of the priorities of the latter is to obtain a common position on the Programme [22] during its term (July-December 2001)
New initiatives are tailored to help library managers cope with challenges arising from communication technologies and with political issues such as realising a European Culture Space and an Information Society for all. There is a pressing need to adapt the latest innovative information systems to better perform and improve the functionality, usability and acceptability of products and services. The European programmes have covered a wide range of key issues with a problem-solving perspective and application driven research. Available and future-oriented technologies can all be found easily on CORDIS. In addition, participating in the current shaping of the European Research Area could prove useful to ensure that memory institution–related research will still be widely addressed. In this respect as well CORDIS services can help.
or search feature
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Thibault Heuzé
CORDIS Community Research and Development Information Service
CORDIS Content Team
Rue Montoyer, 40
1000 Brussels, Belgium
t.heuze@cordis.lu
http://www.cordis.lu
Phone: +32.2.238.17.37
Thibault Heuzé is employed as an external contractor in the CORDIS Content team. His responsibilities include relations with the non-profit sector, promotion of new services and support to the exploitation of research results.
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For citation purposes:
Heuzé, T. "Present and Future Innovation Opportunities for the Library and Information Community at European Level", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/cordis/>
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By Colin Beardon - October 2001
Traditional approaches to the design of software emanate from technical practice yet, as environments come to contain more multimedia, there is a need to appreciate the nature of creative practice. This is not simply a matter of borrowing specific techniques but requires a fundamental review of the design process and, particularly, the role of prototypes and the concept of the 'user'. The 'creative user' has particular features which lead to a different design method in which (in a post-modern sense) the software designer releases some control over the meaning of the software. These ideas are explored and illustrated through the example of the Visual Assistant software developed for visualisation in the domain of theatre.
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Design practice in relation to the production of computer software has grown historically from a set of concerns that are derived from the conception of the computer as a processor of symbols. The development of multimedia computing during the 1990s raised many questions about the viability of such approaches (e.g. Bjerknes & Bratteteig 1995; Crampton Smith & Tabor 1996). The present combination of techniques for producing images and sounds, time-based sequencing and user-interactivity presents us with a vastly more complex user experience which requires a fundamental review of our design practices.
It is a cliché to say that 'a picture is worth a thousand words' but in the field of multimedia computing this is demonstrably true. In terms of mathematical information theory, an image file is typically about one thousand times the size of a text file meaning that it contains that much more 'information'. More fundamentally, that quantitative increase leads to a qualitative change in the nature of the information. The meanings that we assign to a detailed colour image are much more complex than the meanings we assign to, say, a boolean expression as a database search term. The visual domain generates meaning in a different way and therefore necessitates a different kind of practice, one that is traditionally referred to as 'creative practice'.
If this was true for two-dimensional images and early multimedia pieces, how much more true it is for those animated three-dimensional environments with interactivity we call 'virtual environments'. Understanding them and designing them requires a range of skills and approaches that stretches the capabilities of any designer and forces us back to some philosophical considerations. For example, the question, what does software mean? was examined at length during the 1970s in the attempt to provide a sound semantics for programming languages (leading to VDM, etc.) but this question needs to be asked again in the context of virtual environments. Similarly, the relationship of software and system design to 'the user' has been studied over the years mainly with respect to office based systems, but the 'user' of a contemporary virtual environments is unlikely to operate in a well-defined organisational context or have the performance of routine tasks as a high priority.
If we admit a role for creative practice in the design or use
of a system then a clearer understanding of the concept of
'creativity' is key to the development of a sound design
process. As the word is used in many different contexts, and is
in danger of overload, I will try to be reasonably precise in my
usage. For the purposes of this study: 'creativity' is a mode
of human interaction with the world that can be contrasted to a
technical (or systematic) mode of interaction. That is to
say, when seeking to produce something or solve a problem in the
world we are faced with the option of adopting a technical
strategy or a creative strategy (or possibly others). This is
the first part of the description of the term; simply to describe
it as a mode of interaction is insufficient and we need also to
say what differentiates it in terms of its practices and
values.
Creative practice tends:
A technical strategy, by contrast, will tend to use formalism, symbolic representations and logical reasoning; will try to eliminate ambiguity; will seek certainty and pursue correctness, completeness and detail.
During any significant real-world task, whether it be the proof of a theorem, the construction of reliable software, the production of an art piece, or the performance of a play, we need to employ both of these modes of interaction with the world. Given the nature of a problem, each mode may prove more or less effective at different times during the process, but a combination of the two is almost always necessary.
Creativity, by this account, is not an attribute of a few romantic outsiders (Cubbs 1994) nor a simple property of things: it is what Gilbert Ryle called a 'disposition' (Ryle 1949). If we say that some person or task is particularly 'creative' we are not saying that their every action involves pure creativity, and we are not saying that only certain people or tasks are creative. We are saying that a successful practitioner is able to operate in both creative and technical modes, and will be able to employ each ability to maximum effectiveness.
This view of creativity is shared by Margaret Boden.
Nor is [creativity] confined to a chosen few, for — despite the elitist claims of inspirationists and romantics alike — we all share some degree of creative power, which is grounded in our ordinary human abilities. (Boden 1990 p.12)
Boden also argues that to be called creative, an idea needs to
be quite radical,
A merely novel idea is one which can be described and/or produced
by the same set of generative rules as are other, familiar ideas.
A genuinely original, or creative, idea is one which cannot.
(Boden 1990 p.40)
This leads her to a very specific research approach, based
around the question,
…what must a program be like, to appear creative? [p.150]
a formulation shared by other researchers (e.g. Partridge & Rowe 1994).
There is a problem with this formulation in that we are given no prior independent description of creativity to separate it from the technical formulation of the research question — the danger being that the conclusion of the research becomes limited by the original formulation. What is required is a concept of 'creativity' that is independent and empirically grounded.
The grounding of 'creativity' occurs through the concept of 'creative practice', a term which refers to what people actually do when they are engaged in this mode of interaction with the world. This is the starting point of Malcolm McCullough who is critical of technical ways of describing creativity.
…many recent studies of creative computation have confined themselves to decidable methods in symbolic processing. Despite the loss of certainty having been demonstrated even in mathematics, orthodox academics in countless disciplines hold fast to deterministic knowledge. It is as if scientism is the only way to legitimate creativity. (McCullough 1996 p.104)
McCullough uses the term 'creativity' sparingly, opting instead for the notion of 'craft' within a digital context. This choice of words signifies that, when dealing with creativity on its own terms, we should focus on working methods and practices, not on products or people.
Adopting such an approach leads to a very different research question:
Is it possible to employ technology in order to assist the (human) processes of creativity?
It is this question which guides the development programme described in this paper and the wider considerations of design issues.
Sadly, for the majority of people involved in creative practice the computer has become associated predominantly with routine practice; a situation reflected in the cliché, The computer is only a tool. Seeing the computer in this way associates it with technical practice and the consequences are quite negative.
[The computer] begins to draw by starting from the details: ‘No detail, no design.’ The order is inverted: you no longer follow the age-old method which used to consist of working up a rough idea, going on to the sketches — introducing precision step by step — and arriving at the details at the end of the process. The detail ... is required right from the start, during the preliminary phase: the natural order is inverted. (Parent 1995 p.93)
Using computers for routine, technical tasks is seen in
opposition to creative problem-solving,
I have observed that when students are allowed to initiate the
problem-solving process on screen, they spend unrewarding hours
dragging forms around the screen and not evolving an idea. They
are simply rearranging it. (Morin 1999) and the technology
becomes quickly restricted to performing purely technical
tasks.
In contrast, a recent UK Arts Council report argued that multimedia can be used to liberate creativity. Comparing multimedia to drama, it said that
…multimedia can act as a similar servant to the curriculum, in that it offers a means to explore other subjects in an imaginative and motivating fashion. The Report also identifies specific general skills which creative multimedia can help to develop… …working in groups; the value of pre-production planning; the fact that students traditionally excluded from our educational system can participate; the high premium placed on discussion, decision-making and negotiation; the fact that other core skills (for example, numeracy, design work, keyboards) are used in the production; and finally the fact that the product can be displayed and used by a peer audience. (Sefton-Green 1999)
Normally, creative practitioners have a sophisticated relationship to their tools and their reduction of computers to routine tasks indicates a significant design issue which needs to be understood. Tools help define a medium within which users can create work. In this context, the notion that there should be one all-embracing, complete, coherent and purely technical tool is highly questionable. Within each creative practice people will ensure that they use a variety of objects as tools, and simple tools (e.g. a pencil) often create a rich medium within which expressive ideas can be realised. This may be the reason why one designer-maker has expressed a preference for early versions of software products, finding that as the product becomes more embracing and consistent then it becomes less useful for creative practice (Beardon et al 1997). The technical values of completeness and consistency may work counter to the needs of the creative user.
Within the craft (or 'designer-maker') tradition uncertainty can also have benefits. The wood carver, David Pye, drew the distinction between the “the workmanship of risk” and “the workmanship of certainty”. In the workmanship of risk “the quality of the result is continually at risk during the process of making”, whereas in the workmanship of certainty “the quality of the result is exactly predetermined before a single saleable thing is made” (Pye 1986). Pye held that the workmanship of risk was essential to creative craft practice and can be read into the products by the knowledgeable observer. We may go further than this and say that it adds to the 'aura' and even to the value of the created object.
Such opposition to the technical values behind much software leads some artists and designers to adopt a distinctly 'subversive' attitude towards the software they use. For example, one artist has written
…it is up to the artist to subjugate the program by subverting the deliberate short cuts written into it, which have been designed to make the lay user feel as if they can obtain the same results as an artist. (Stocker 1995)
These bold assertions of the values of creative practice indicate that the radically 'new' is unlikely to be generated by clever variations of the technical but, rather, by creative human beings re-possessing and re-interpreting the technically designed products they are presented with. Allowing for user involvement within a technically-driven design paradigm is one possible model for user participation, but from the standpoint of creative practice the possession and redefinition of software tools is already happening. Ultimately, as we shall see, it is not the software designers but the users who need to decide what software 'means'.
To be 'novel' or 'radical' is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for calling something creative. As Partridge and Rowe point out, it also needs to be 'appropriate' in some sense (Partridge and Rowe 1994 p.7). Umberto Eco addresses this issue in The Open Work (Eco 1983). In the chapter entitled Openness, Information, Communication, Eco attempts to relate the aesthetic concept of the 'open work' to mathematical information theory. There is a clear tension between the modernist framework within which we are accustomed to consider that theory, and the postmodern view that meaning is (at least partly) created by the user or the audience. Eco resolves this tension by describing the open work as 'potential':
This tendency towards disorder, characteristic of the poetics of openness, must be understood as a tendency toward controlled disorder, toward a circumscribed potential, toward a freedom that is constantly curtailed by the germ of formativity present in any form that wants to remain open to the free choice of the addressee. (Eco 1983 p.64-65)
A similar analysis is provided by Pierre Levy in his formulation of the 'virtual' as being opposed not to the 'real' but to the 'actual'. Virtual objects, Levy argues, have a 'real' (e.g. material) existence but they differ in that their full potentiality has not yet been actualised or 'realised' (Levy 1997). The comprehension of that potential must occur through some 'code', be that formal, scientific, metaphoric, or whatever.
As computing tends towards multimedia and virtual environments we must become increasingly aware that software produces a rich cultural meaning. Furthermore, environments that intend to support creativity must ground their meaning within a post-modernist perspective. The meaning of a virtual environment no longer resides entirely with the designer of the product, but significantly with the users. To restate this in a different frame of reference, we might say that the task of the environment designer becomes to create a 'code' (or a 'language') within which other people (the 'users') can make interesting statements.
This means a shift in the traditional role of the 'user' with respect to the computer-based system. Traditionally, users have been seen as operators of a machine very much within the Taylorist model of the division of labour. The user had a precise task to perform and the computer performed some proportion of that task, with the human user performing the remainder. There was essentially no difference between the two types of activity as both were defined functionally. An alternative simile to the machine-and-operative is that of the composer-performer-audience. Here the software designer can play the creative role of composer and the software product becomes likened to the musical score. The 'user', in this version, is compared to the musician or musicians who make something that can be experienced. A third group (sometimes referred to as the 'usees') can be compared to the audience who (hopefully) appreciate the object thus created.
The processes whereby we specify, develop and evaluate software thus conceived are significantly different from those commonly accepted for more traditional software (see Beardon 1999). In essence, the designer must first reach an understanding of the 'language' in use within the field of practice and then design a novel code for the (partial) expression of this. This code is then embodied in a piece of software which is presented to potential users as a medium but without a clear steer as to what it might be used for. I have referred to this process as 'put-it-on-the-table' design. This is, of course, an idealised model but it can be taken as an alternative to strict task-oriented approaches to design. Through a process of development, evaluation, reflection and redesign the product not only evolves in a broad context of use, but the real meaning (or potential) of the product becomes better understood by all involved.
Software environments developed in this general way will need to take care in their initial formulation. In general, they will want to present an accessible, believable and relevant code but the software also needs to define a new medium within which people can work creatively to advantage. When it comes to evaluation, the aims of such software should be clear: for example,
Many of these ideas have evolved over the past six years during which time the author has been involved in a continuing project to design and develop software for visualisation within the context of theatre (the Visual Assistant). It is always possible to present the design of software with the benefit of hindsight as an example of functionally-driven design. As two software engineers have described it,
The preceding describes the ideal process that we would like to follow and the documentation that would be produced during that process. The process is 'faked' by presenting the documents that would have been produced if we had done things the ideal way … No matter how often we stumble on our way, the final documentation will be rational and accurate. (Parnas & Clements 1986).
For some purposes such a description might be valid, but in an article on design methods such 'faking' would be dishonest. If at the outset of this project I had ideas about the advantages that the software might eventually provide, they at considerable variance from the advantages that have been achieved. In presenting this account it is therefore important to present the sequence of issues as they arose and this I will attempt to do.
The first discussions took place within the HaMLET project team where a number of fundamental aims were established. The environment was to provide a means for visualisation within the domain of theatre and it should relate to the needs to both theatre professionals and those in theatre education or training. It was to be concerned with communication over long distances — both how professionals may collaborate without being in the same physical location, and how theatre education might take place at a distance. As an EU-funded project, it was to address the issues of different cultures within Europe (especially different theatre cultures). It was also to recognise the existing working practices of theatre practitioners, and acknowledge that they have no particular liking for computers or willingness to overcome large initial difficulties in the interests of some potential longer-term gain. In short it had to develop with the approval of working practitioners.
Most fundamental, though, was the recognition that theatre is itself the 'virtual environment' par excellence.
…the theatre puts one or two objects on a planked wooden floor, throws light on them, and asks the audience to believe they are seeing, let us say, ancient Rome. (Hall 1989)
The main challenge behind the VA project was to devise an environment that works alongside such creativity: one that complements human creativity rather than attempting to replace it.
The complexity of existing software for modelling 3D environments, plus a tradition that can use only a few props to imagine a rich world, led to the exploration of a new 'code' for theatre visualisation. This code aimed to utilise the relative abundance of 2D images and the simplicity of manipulating them with computers. The challenge became this: would it be possible to develop a code for the arrangement and manipulation of 2D images within a 3D space that was both simple to use and rich enough for theatre practitioners to explore or develop their imagination? And, having done so, would the result be of any particular creative advantage with respect to their final theatrical productions?
The VA environment attempts to address these issues by combining both 2D and 3D representations in a manner that reduces the complexity for users while providing an extension of the techniques of sketching within a 3D environment. In order to do this it was necessary to abandon traditional 3D representation based upon the geometry of light and to utilise a different representational convention. The most obvious for our purposes was collage, wherein discrete objects are juxtaposed. The cultural traditions of collage, particularly in enabling the appropriation and reinterpretation of culturally bound images, led to a degree of enthusiasm for this approach.
In addition to a new 'code' based around the vague idea of '3D collage', it was also necessary to aim for simplicity of use. In particular, the design aimed to,
The resulting software is not large or complex and some readers may question it being called a 'virtual environment' at all. It contains about 15,000 lines of C code and will run in 8Mb of RAM, producing only standard VGA output (for details of the software see Appendix 1). By working with the users' imagination I have attempted to provide a contribution within a particular domain which owes much to the appropriate technology movement (but that is the topic of another paper). Significantly, from the user's point of view there is a sense of involvement and users have shown a preparedness to use the 'virtual environment' I have built and to read the output from it as a representation of another imagined 'virtual environment' that they will create on stage.
The process of development, implementation, usage, reflection and re-design has been long and intermittent. Many of the design and evaluation methods employed in software development have had to be reviewed. In particular, the roles given to prototyping and usability testing.
While prototypes of virtual environments can have some use, in testing formal relationships for example, they are inappropriate for testing more holistic features. I recall an occasion where students created a mock-up of an interface in order to explore underlying functionality. They created the boxes that were to contain information and then wished to indicate the absence of a visual design, so they printed the boxes and applied a rough watercolour wash for the remaining areas, scanning this compound image for use in the prototype. The users of this prototype were fascinated by the watercolour wash effect, to the extent that they expressed little interest in the formal aspects. The single useful outcome of the prototyping exercise was that this visual effect should be retained. While the intention of using it was to neutralise the visual aspect, the users could only read it as part of the proposed design.
Once it is accepted that multimedia and virtual environments use complex ways to convey meaning, building a prototype that neutralises certain aspects is a problematic activity — every pixel, every delay, every sound may be relevant. Creative practitioners, if they retain their traditions, will be very sophisticated readers of software and will tend to see everything as a potential finished product. Consequently, it is difficult for the software developer to present users with prototypes (something that might have been predicted as the true meaning of the software, and hence control over parts of that meaning, have yet to be resolved). The question needs to be reformulated: in what sense is it possible to have a 'prototype code'? The answer is that it is not possible, but it is possible to have a simpler, or in some sense 'incomplete code', and that is probably the direction in which prototyping for this kind of environment should go.
One of the techniques for user involvement during a prototype-driven design method is usability testing (Dumas & Redish 1994). This is a product-oriented procedure that addresses the viewpoint of the user by involving a group of typical users at each stage in testing through the performance of real tasks. As a technique it is usually based around the assumptions that the software will perform a particular pre-defined task and that the computer will function as a well-defined symbol-processor and it does not take into account the specifics of multimedia computing or creative practice. If forced to describe the task of the VA software, it would be "to provide a novel code within which creative things may be made". This would not get us very far with traditional evaluation techniques.
To adapt usability testing to the creative domain we must first accept that the meaning of a software product will only be determined though use. The development method therefore involves creating sample products and seeing how they may be used, thereby generating meaning. We build upon the greatest areas of success and need, and reduce those areas which are least successful (in order to keep the overall functionality within limits). Like any living language, it must evolve to match the community's needs.
Early versions of the Visual Assistant were used by members of the HaMLET project, principally educators, professional theatre directors and scriptwriters. At this stage there was still a tendency to think of the software as a device for creating prototype set designs. The comments of these potential users corrected this: the VA was seen to be good at allowing the imagination to flow, at creating an atmosphere rather than a detailed model, at suggesting the environment within which actors can perform, and at providing a way in which textual and visual notes can be combined in a hypertextual way.
Further significant understandings and developments were derived from a series of workshops held in 1998 and 1999. In October 1998 the VA was used in a workshop at Malmö University College, Sweden with a group of 18 students for five working days. The VA was used as an environment for imagining scenes from Strindberg's A Dream Play and we were able to hold several plenary sessions at which progress was discussed. It became immediately apparent that projecting the image, rather than viewing it on a monitor, brought about a qualitative advance in understanding the output in the context of theatre space. Furthermore, the ability to manipulate the model, both in the VA and in a VRML browser, led to peer group review sessions that could pursue alternatives in real time. There was a positive sense of the technology residing in the background, yet supporting an intellectual discourse about the realisation of the play.
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| Figure 1. A design for A Dream
Play Created by students at Malmö University College, Sweden using the Visual Assistant. Viewed using Cosmoplayer plug-in. |
In May 1999 a three-week workshop was held at Central St Martin's School of Art, London Institute involving about 12 students from the second year of the Set Design degree course. The objective of this exercise was more abstract: to imagine a dramatic moment in Bruckner's play Woyzech. In addition to working within the Visual Assistant, students were also asked to develop their designs into working set design models using Chris Dyer's virtual_Stages software (Dyer 1999).
With more time, students developed more complex ideas and began to use the VA in different ways. For some, the number of images was still limited but more care was been taken over the quality of images. For others, it gave the opportunity to represent a large number of objects (e.g. a crowd) and to explore issues concerned with movement. Another student was able to produce designs with a truly architectural quality. Yet another became interested in the potential of collage in terms of the real set design.
A video projector was only available at the end of the project and this was the only time that group discussion could occur. Nevertheless, the ability to project images and manipulate objects in real time led to some interesting discussions. Questions of scale became apparent (set designs without a human figure are difficult to scale), as well as the potential of rotating stages, and of the effect of changing colours. Issues such as these were discussed in the presence of live manipulations.
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| Figure 2. A design for
Woyzech Created by a student at Central St, Martin's School of Art & Design, UK . Created and viewed using Visual Assistant.. |
In February 1998, and again in February 1999, the VA was used at the University of Plymouth with a group of about 40 first year Theatre and Performance students. This is a more general Performing Arts degree course, typical of many currently offered in the UK. These courses face some fundamental issues concerning contemporary culture. For example, theatre education, though essentially about doing things, is dominated by words and the visual, spatial and action-oriented nature of it are often underplayed. When it is visual, our culture tends to be two-dimensional (e.g. magazines) and many people have difficulty imagining three dimensional forms and spaces. Television, while addressing some of these issues, creates an expectation of close-up photography, yet stage drama requires full-body representation. For a fuller discussion of these issues and the potential of the VA in helping address them see Beardon and Enright (1999).
During the design, implementation, evaluation and use of the VA I have felt that I, as a software designer, have made an important transition from a technically-oriented software designer (i.e. a computer scientist) to a designer-maker of software (i.e. a craft worker). The full implications of this transition are not yet clear for sometimes there is a definite need for technical skills, but the main thrust of it lies in a revised design philosophy. I am working with a user community in a creative interaction, where my creative skills are being employed to understand their domain at some deeper level and to posit, in software form, some new reality/code within which they may themselves become more creative. This has required a major re-think of design practices and a merging of technical software design and designer-maker practice.
Software designers are now facing a dilemma as users adopt an increasingly creative role. As designers they must accept responsibility for the use of their software (it is not acceptable to excuse themselves by claiming their software was used 'improperly') yet they must delegate some responsibility for its meaning to the users. This is a major ethical issue in the design of virtual environments. The design of the VA has, I hope, begun to open up some of the issues involved in this dilemma, but there is still some way to go before our understanding is commensurate with the task before us.
The main features of the Visual Assistant (VA 1.5) are as follows.
The Visual Assistant currently runs on Apple Macintosh computers only. A PC version is under development and should be ready soon. Check the project's web-site [1] where free downloadable versions are available. The Apple version currently occupies under 600K of disk space, making it transferable on floppy-disk if desired. To run it needs 8Mb RAM. The current version of the VA (1.5) runs on any PowerPC or G3 processor but will not work on the older 68000 series models (Classic, LC, Performa). Graphics performance will depend upon processor speed and VRAM (233 MHz with 4Mb VRAM seems to work acceptably).
Beardon, C., Gollifer, S., Rose, C. & Worden, S. (1997)
Computer Use by Artists and Designers: Some Perspectives on Two
Design Traditions. In: Kyng, M. & Mathiassen, L. (eds.)
Computers and Design in Context. MIT Press, Camb, Mass. pp.
27-50.
Beardon, C. (1999) The design of software to support creative
practice. Proc. IDATER 99 Conference, University of
Loughborough, August, 1999.
Beardon,C. & Enright,T. (1999) Computer-based improvisation:
some experiences of using the Visual Assistant in teaching.
Digital Creativity 10(3) 153-166.
Bjerknes, G. & Bratteteig, T. (1995) 'User participation - a
strategy for work life democracy?'. In Trigg, R., Anderson, S.I.
& Dykstra-Erikson, E. (eds.) PDC’94 Proceedings of the
participatory design conference, Chapel Hill, NC, 27-28.
Boden, M. (1990) The Creative mind: myths & mechanisms.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
Crampton Smith, G & Tabor, P. (1996) The role of the
artist-designer. In Winograd, T. (ed.) Bringing Design to
Software. Addison-Wesley, Reading, Ma. pp. 3757.
Cubbs, J. (1994) Rebels, mystics, and outcasts: the romantic
artist outsider. In Hall, M.D. & Metcalfe, E.W. The artist
ousider: creativity and the boundaries of culture. Smithsonian
Institution Press, Washington, 7693.
Dyer, C. (1999) Virtual_Stages: an interactive model of
performance spaces for creative teams, technicians and students.
Digital Creativity 10(3) 143152.
Eco, U. (1983) The open work, trans. Cangoni, A., Harvard
University Press, Camb, MA.
Hall, P. (1989) Introduction. In Goodwin, J. (ed.) British
Theatre Design: the modern age. Weidenfeld & Nicholson,
London.
Levy, P. (1997) Welcome to Virtuality. Digital Creativity 8(1)
310.
McCullough, M. (1996) Abstracting craft: the practiced digital
hand. MIT Press, Camb, Mass.
Morin, J. (1999) Integating technology into a problem-solving
curriculum. Unpublished paper presented at ICFAD 99 Conference,
Auckland, 8-13 October 1999.
Parent, C. (1995) Senso inverso o senso vietato? Spaces and
Society, Jan/March 1995, 91-93.
Parnas, D. & Clements P. (1986) A rational design process:
how and why to fake it. s 12(8) 251257.
Partridge, D. & Rowe, J. (1994) Computers and creeativity.
Intellect, Exeter.
Pye, D. (1986) On Workmanship. In: David Pye: Wood Carver and
Turner. Crafts Council, London.
Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. Penguin Books,
Harmondsworth, UK.
Sefton-Green, J. (1999) A framework for digital arts and the
curriculum. In Sefton-Green, J. (ed.) Young people, creativity
and new technologies: the challenge of digital arts. Routledge,
London, 146154.
Stocker, G. (1995) Artist's statement. In: Worden, S. (ed)
Digital Creativity CD-ROM. University of Brighton, UK.
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Colin Beardon
Exeter School of Arts & Design, UK
su1620@eclipse.co.uk
http://www.plym.ac.uk/
Colin Beardon is Professor of Arts & Design at Exeter School of Arts & Design, University of Plymouth, UK and a Visiting Professor at the School of Arts & Communication, Malmo University, Sweden. He has an academic background in philosophy and computer science and for the past eleven years has been researching into various aspects of communication using multimedia and the design of digital technologies to support human creative practices.
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For citation purposes:
Beardon, C. "Creative Practices and the Design of Virtual Environments ", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/creative/>
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By Rob Davies - October 2001
Rob Davies discusses the possible relationship between the e-Content's PSINet project, demonstrating the commercial potential of Europe's Public Sector Information (PSI), and digital culture.
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PSINet
[1] is a preparatory action under the
European Union’s e-Content programme, supporting the overall
aim to explore and demonstrate the commercial potential of
Europe's Public Sector Information (PSI). Among the key issues to
be addressed are standards and new forms of public/private
partnerships and exploitation models. PSINet covers and involves
the ten associated states of Central and Eastern Europe
(C&EE) as well as all EU member states.
PSINet is setting out to:
The PSINet Preparatory Action has taken significant steps toward creation of a human network for identification of good practice, exchange of knowledge. By the end of its one-year period of work on December 31 2001, important elements of this framework will be put in place including:
The actors, domains and areas of activity within ‘PSI’ are very diverse, encompassing, for example, those with a strategic and commercial interest in:
The overall goal of wide interoperability in the interests of usability demands that the public, private and NGO interests involved come together to enable new and more productive types of partnership and business models to emerge.
There is a need for high-level knowledge exchange, stimulation of best practice, consensus building and dissemination. The continued activation of a human network is necessary to overcome the fragmentation and generally weak co-ordination of developments, which applies nationally and across Europe, in the field of PSI.
It is planned that a Network of Excellence (EPSINet) with links to all EU and C&EE countries will be established as result of the PSINet preparatory action, building on its findings. EPSINet will enable consensus building, exchange of knowledge and learning from good practice among those organisations concerned with PSI.
PSINet has identified four priority areas where a strong Europe-wide focus over the next 2 years is likely to have an impact. There is also a growing recognition that these issues are global and much is to be gained by internationalisation of knowledge sharing and research.
There is a need to:
There is a need to establish regulatory environments in member states which encourage adoption of positive regulatory frameworks eg involving Freedom of Information, non-assertion of government copyright, a sense of public ownership of PSI and affirmative rights of public access.
There are gains to be achieved by further encouragement of innovation and emulation of successful developments in delivery channels for PSI. This involves an enhanced process of knowledge exchange about architectures and developments such as portal search technologies, involving not only Web-based portals but also the use of telephone, television, kiosks and other digital technologies.
Important work is now being undertaken to establish metadata standards for government information in Europe. There is a need to build on this and to move more rapidly toward consensus on standards needed for wide interoperability of PSI, such as:
The field encompassed by the term PSI is so broad that there is a clear temptation to refine the area by exclusion wherever possible. Reasons to ‘ignore Culture’ may be seen to include the fact that Cultural Heritage Applications currently have their own ‘home’ within EU programmes such as IST and Culture 2000. However, developments such as the FP6 workprogramme and the ‘ Florence Agenda’ may however provide good reasons for the two fields to embrace one another. There are other good reasons for contemplating this. Much cultural heritage content is by definition PSI. Wide interoperability through the deployment of common standards is in the general interest of users.
Other common concerns include approaches to unlocking content, business models, quality of content and IPR. The Cultural Heritage field may have successes from which other PSI domains can learn, by virtue of its concern with multimedia added-value content and the need to utilize high bandwidth. The particularities of the culturalisation of the economy/economisation of culture, identified by a recent study on Exploitation and development of the job potential in the cultural sector in the age of digitalization [2] - especially the growth in the employment of freelancers and small companies in digital cultural content production- may also provide an exemplar of the benefits which better exploitation of PSI can bring to the SME sector.
A discussion list and news service will shortly be inaugurated [1].
Please contact us at any of the following addresses or through your country coordinator (see below).
Business models workshop
Frankfurt Book Fair, 10 October 2001
Standards workshop
Details to be announced.
Regional workshops to assess regional and national factors: commonalities and divergences
Details to be announced.
The current country co-ordinators are:
More information on the country co-ordinatiors and PSINet partners is available from the Web site [1]. For further information on PSINet please contact the Project Director or Special Advisor [3].
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Rob Davies
MDR Partners, UK
rob.davies@mdrpartners.com
http://www.mdrpartners.com
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For citation purposes:
Davies, R. "PSInet: Public Sector Information Network", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/psinet/>
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By Patrizia Coluccia, Francesca Garofalo, Maria Chiara Liguori, Silvia Monfardini and Francesco Serafini - October 2001
The CINECA team (Interuniversity Consortium) talk about their role as a leading player in the visualization field.
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CINECA (Interuniversity Consortium established in 1969) is a Consortium of 15 Italian Universities and the CNR (National Research Council) whose mission is:
Since 1988, Cineca has been investing in visualization techniques to support the research through a dedicated laboratory.
VIS.I.T. (VISual Information Technology) [1] is an inter-disciplinary laboratory dedicated to developing human-centered, powerful, interactive 3D graphics tools in a variety of fields, including Scientific Visualization, Bioengineering and Cultural Heritage. The mission of the lab is to present concepts and techniques, as well as massive or complex numerical data through Interactive Computer Graphics, Virtual Reality and Human Computer Interaction technologies. The VIS.I.T. Lab is an open space room with several workstations and an Onyx2 SGI graphic supercomputer connected with the Origin 3800 and the Cray T3E massively parallel computer of CINECA by a high-bandwidth interconnection. Some 3D graphics applications developed in the lab benefit from being viewed in real time in two semi-immersive Virtual Reality environments: the CINECA's Virtual Theatre (VIS.I.T. Theatre), based on SGI Reality Center technologies, and the Workbench BARCO Baron. The Virtual Theatre is a structure dedicated to the immersive three-dimensional computerized visualization with a surround sound system and a semicircular screen that allows the spectator to experience the illusion of a three-dimensional vision [2].
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| Figure 1: CINECA’S Virtual Theatre |
Virtual Reality [3] is increasingly viewed as a powerful instrument of knowledge. VR enables us to see the world through a sense and motion learning process, a more natural process for human beings than the symbolic-reconstructive way (i.e. writing). VR applications allow users to experience a high degree of realism that grows with the use of immersive technologies.
The word “virtual”, increasingly used in everyday language, has become a moment of comparison and reflection for a great number of researchers, who supply us “shaded” definitions with increasingly complex meanings. If in common language the meaning is stretched to include every surrogate of the digital format of reality, from a technical point of view, with “virtual reality” we refer to a particular kind of interactive simulation, in which the viewer has the feeling of being in an environment he can go through, and observe even if it does not exist concretely, but it is created “in real time” from electronically processed data. The data can regard almost every topic: a land model, a flight simulation, a biochemical system, an engineering plan, an architectonic environment, etc.
At the moment several interdisciplinary projects are developed at VIS.I.T.’s laboratory, with the aim of realizing immersive high-resolution virtual environments.
The simulations benefit from the 1:1 scale fruition that the CINECA’s Virtual Theatre offers, aiding the visualization of scenarios thanks to the visual width and the fruition immersiveness. In a research structure like CINECA, a Virtual Theatre represents a valuable source for research and development in the scientific field, in Cultural Heritage and industrial production, representing a useful resource also for Public Administration. As Tomaso Poggio states in his text L'Occhio e il Cervello: Che cosa significa vedere [4], “the sight is more than a sense, it is intelligence, and so the processing and the immersive visualization of complex data allow multiplying the available information making it comprehensible with greater immediacy.”
Applied to research, Virtual Theatre therefore becomes an instrument that increases collective intelligence. Pierre Lévy [5] sees collective intelligence like a common understanding between human beings, aimed to exchange culture and reinvent the social tie in function of the mutual teaching and the synergy of competences. The availability of these technologies opens up a new perspective and a new way of interpreting already known aspects, realizing once again the more authentic sense of the word " theatre", that ancient Greeks intended as the space of observing in order to understand.
Some opportunities have been immediately picked up on by surgical research (using the projection table in the Virtual Theatre, for scientific visualization, obtaining a vision of the object comparable to the one the surgeon has of the patient on the surgical bed), by meteorology, astronomy, GIS (Geographic Information Systems), Landscape analysis, and, in Cultural Heritage, by archaeology and History.
Scientific visualization [6] is very useful for graphic exploration of complex data sets. Users and researchers have the capability to better comprehend visual patterns and dynamical relationships of great complexity thanks to the use of visualization tools for viewing, analyzing and understanding scientific data.
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| Figure 2: Molecular Dynamics simulation of a potential peptidomimetic drug |
Initially, in chemistry and physics the possibility of seeing the phenomena in 3 dimensions has been considered useful, above all in divulgation and didactics. Currently researchers are beginning to obtain interesting data from the point of view of the experimentation. In astrophysics, the observations produce very huge amounts of data, not easy to manage, and the immersive three-dimensional visualization offers remarkable advantages in understanding. In the last years, as an example, the development of powerful systems of computing has allowed us to study the evolutive mechanisms of the Universe, and to visualize its results.
 |
| Figure 3: Clusters of Galaxy: formation of clusters of galaxies in the universe |
Moreover, advanced projects in the field of meteorology have been developed, like the simulation of relevant atmospherical events (such as tornadoes), and periodical events (as the level of the waves in Mediterranean Sea, the surface oceanic temperature between 1980 and 1996).
 |
| Figure 4: Simulation of a Tornado |
In medicine, the applications of virtual reality show at best their usefulness. In this field some applications of planning and simulating surgical operations are performed. Hipop application aids surgeons who perform operations of total hip replacement, previewed in thecase of deforming arthrosis and other pathologies. The program allows completion of important tests longer before performing the operation of positioning the replacement within the hip.
 |
| Figure 5: The HIPOP
interface The left window shows the projections of the CT data set along the axis of its system of reference. The right window shows the cross sections corresponding to the lines drawn in right window. |
The techniques of virtual surgery have also opened new important horizons in the operations of maxillo-facial type, concurring, for example, to simulate the operation on the face and to preview the final result with optimal approximation. Similar programs have also been used in a plan aiming to characterise a fast, scientific and automatic method to reconstruct the human faces: a study case was a mummy head conserved at the Archaeological Museum of Florence. In the field of the Cultural Heritage, the fundamental role of the visual components is being considered, the virtual technologies are adapted and offer a series of interesting opportunities to the visualization.
 |
| Figure 6: Virtual reconstruction of an ancient Mummy starting from digitiset CT scan |
Virtual Reconstructions allow:
[7] In particular CINECA is developing several projects related to the concept of Virtual historical environments in different historical periods: from Ancient to Contemporary History, passing through Modern history, also paying attention to educational purposes [8].
The transfer of culture to the younger generations is made easier if accessed through 3D reconstructions, big and small historical events can be better perceived through narration, images, voices and music set in an immersive environment.
Some examples of the work performed in this area are:
[9] The interface has been developed in order to allow visitors to witness the evolution of the city, from the end of the first millennium to the present day, enabling them to visit the city in the four dimensions with simple and efficient navigation tools; and with an innovative kind of access to the historical sources that validate this virtual reconstruction. Interacting with the Nu.M.E. interface the visitors should be able to:
The first implementation of Nu.M.E. has been a Web based Virtual Environment, and a 'light' version of it can be downloaded from Internet. A prototype version of Nu.M.E is accessible at the CINECA's Virtual Theatre [10].
[11] From stove to air-conditioner, from steel pen to computer, the Twentieth Century has seen amazing changes in everyday life and the most important evidence can be found in consumer goods and in the way we use them. The first virtual environment developed by the MUVI project is a house of the 1950s, chosen as a significant starting point in order to understand some relevant changes occurred in 20th century daily life. Post-war Italy had to confront new concepts, images and behavioural patterns inspired to welfare and mass consumption. Washing machines, refrigerators and trousers for women had already made their appearance decades before, yet only in the Fifties they spread out at all social levels, together with other products, entirely new in certain cases, such as television sets. So, for example, in the virtual kitchen there's a Fiat fridge, set in relation to photos of real 1950's fridges, advertisements and other sources - used as an authentication of the virtual reconstruction - and accompanied by written/oral witnesses and historical analysis explaining changes that followed the spreading of the fridge (as it happened in the way of doing shopping for food) [12].
 |
| Figure 7: Daily Life in the 20th
century Bologna - The Virtual Museum (left the reconstructed Kitchen, right its wire frame version) |
Another important project is called “Bologna city of waters, from the 16th to the 19th century". The aim is to communicate concepts related to the Reno canal and other artificial hydraulic systems that enhanced the development of the manufactories in Bologna – i.e. silk mills - enabling, at the same time, trade and transport thanks to a link leading to river Po, and from there, to Venice and to oversee lands. Along the Reno canal there were hundreds of water wheels and this profusion of “factories” indicates that the Bologna district was a proto-industrial area well before the 18th century. In the second part, the canal, thanks to a series of leaps increasing power and speed of water, fed also the large wheels of wheat mills.
“Casa del Centenario in Pompeii”: in this project part of a Pompeian house is going to be reconstructed starting from the present structures; frescos, which have been taken away and stored in a museum. They will be artificially set again in their original position; frescos left on the walls and damaged due to weather impact will be “replaced” with a less spoiled version worked out using photos taken in the thirties; the ruins will be integrated to reconstruct lacking sections (e.g. the higher part of walls, coverings, fixtures and eventually some furnishings). Once the 3D reconstruction is completed, it will be possible to transmit information about the specific house and about life as it was in ancient Pompeii [13].
The first set-up of a Virtual Theatre realised by VIS.I.T Lab outside its structures, took place in October 2000 during the exhibition “Communication” held in the city centre of Bologna and concerning history, technologies and the future of communication. The presence of a Baby Reality Center, as it has been called, the smaller version of the Virtual Theatre, was created not as a sensationalistic demonstration on computer graphics, but in order to give some examples about possible applications of immersive computer visualisation in scientific and humanistic research fields.
The results weren’t high impact videogames or movies, but demos. For use at the exhibitions the demos had to be made more suitable for a non-specialist audience by adding simple audio explanations and involving music. Two visualisation modalities were applied: automatic or real-time navigation, each with its pros and cons. The automatic navigation avoids technical errors due to the operator and enable a good, under control management of the demos - thanks to the possibility of realising predefined paths, sequences, and view points - and a good sound management and synchronisation. Yet, in a way the demos tend to look like simple movies but without the quality and level of involvement of TV documentaries. Manual navigation, even with its limits, can show, in a way, better the computing power and the huge bulk of work lying behind these applications, enabling also a real-time interaction. The demo is more flexible towards curiosities and specific interests of the audience, easily fitting to its cultural background and age.
The experience gathered during the exhibition is now used for the realisation of new demos, in particular for those related to Cultural Heritage. The aim is to blend the two different kinds of navigation in order to reach a more involving result with: an automatic part explained by recorded audio and a second part with manual navigation and further explanations given by the operator, who would be able to use specific databases realised for many projects and linked to the immersive application.
Demos are available at the Virtual Theatre (images, descriptions, and short movies provided) [14].
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Patrizia Coluccia
CINECA’s Press Office
Francesca Garofalo
CINECA’S High Performance Systems Public Relations
Maria Chiara Liguori
University of Bologna.
Maria Chiara Liguori Created the "Daily life in the 20th century Bologna – the Virtual Museum" project and works on the domestic life section, on the iconography and the Web site. Her research interests include: Material and Consumer Culture, Women's Studies, Visual Information Technologies and Virtual Reality applied to History.
Silvia Monfardini
CINECA’S High Performance System VIS.I.T. Lab
Francesco Serafini
Università-Città Consortium (Bologna)
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For citation purposes:
Coluccia, P., Garofalo, F., Liguori, M.C., Monfardini, S. & Serafini, F. "A Survey of Virtual Reality in the VIS.I.T. Theatre: from Research to Divulgation", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/cineca/>
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By Paul Miller and Sally Criddle - October 2001
Paul Miller and Sally Criddle report on the announcement of successful projects in the New Opportunities Fund's £50,000,000 nof–digi Programme.
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On 2 July 2001, Baroness Pitkeathley unveiled the names of more than 150 UK national and local organisations to receive a share of £50,000,000 (€79,000,000) from the New Opportunities Fund [1]. This event, held at the Science Museum in London, marked the culmination of a process begun almost two years earlier with the original call for applications in August 1999 [2]. These projects are now funded to digitise a broad range of resources from the UK's cultural heritage, and to make the results of their work freely available online, to the benefit of lifelong learners in the UK and beyond. Early results will begin to appear in the coming months, with most projects expected to complete their funded programme of work during the first half of 2003, and all of them required to remain visible and freely accessible online for at least a further three years.
The 37 Consortia and 34 individual projects cover a broad swathe of topics, and their awards range in size from £14,000 to £4,000,000. Each falls within one of NOF's broad themes of Cultural Enrichment, Citizenship in a Modern State, and Reskilling the Nation, and all are intended to support lifelong learning in its broadest sense, rather than being focused upon any single educational system such as the National Curriculum which operates in English, Welsh and Northern Irish schools.
All of the projects are working to digitise pre–existing content, and to make it available in a useable form to a wide range of users, via the Web. Content to be digitised includes newsreel footage from Pathé, early Ordnance Survey maps of the UK held by the British Library and others, images of museum objects, Citizen's Advice information, newspapers, music, and more. The digitised surrogates of this content will further be supported by a wealth of interpretive material, and a variety of packaged learning resources. Other projects are modelling vanished aspects of the Heritage, for example building computer models of Cistercian monasteries with which visitors will be able to interact.
Details of the funded projects are available on the nof–digi site [3], and links to project websites are being added there as they go online.
From the outset, this was seen as a managed Programme, with a two–stage application process followed by continuing monitoring and support throughout the life of the projects.
The initial call, in August 1999, resulted in 343 bids, totalling over £140,000,000 in value. Working closely with partners in Resource [4] and elsewhere, NOF sought to leverage economies of scale and reduce duplication, whilst aiming to ensure that as many of the worthwhile projects as possible received funding.
A consortial approach was adopted, in which apparently similar projects were clustered together and asked to submit revised bids that took account of the potential for financial savings and added value of cooperative working. A set of Technical Guidelines were developed [5], backed up by a support service at UKOLN [6], and workshops were held nationwide at which those selected to submit applications to Stage Two were guided through the process, and encouraged to share ideas and issues.
Even following the award of funding, support for the Programme's participants continues, with a further series of workshops taking place during the Autumn of 2001. In addition, all participants in the Programme receive support from the Technical Advisory Service [6], which is now being provided by UKOLN and the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).
The Advisory Service will be publishing a Manual covering topics such as the management of projects and human resources, quality assurance issues, benchmarking and evaluation processes. Information Papers on specific issues such as XML and multi–media issues are also planned. The Advisory Services' Web site offers links to useful resources and a growing databank of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). It is anticipated that for many, participation in the Programme will provide a learning experience and will offer a 'kick–start' to developments in other areas of digital services provision and/or collaborative working, particularly cross–sectorally. To facilitate this, projects are being encouraged to offer each other support and help by sharing experiences. Email discussion lists have been established and an important aspect of the workshops will be the opportunity for participants from different projects to meet and talk through aspects of their own technical solutions.
An important aspect of the Programme is the need to ensure a visible high–value return on investment, with content remaining useful and useable for many years to come. Given the speed with which technology changes, and the wide range of technical skills across the funded projects, ensuring this long–term interoperability was never going to be straightforward.
The solution adopted was the provision of a set of Technical Standards and Guidelines [5]. This document was made available to all projects invited to submit Second Stage bids, and conformance to the mandatory elements of the document was assessed during the marking process. As well as a relatively small set of Programme–wide mandatory requirements, the document included a great deal of guidance and pointers to Best Practice, which is being backed up by the activities of the Advisory Service. [6].
Although explicitly not intended to act as a straitjacket upon the innovative ideas of individual projects, the Guidelines do serve to ensure a common base level of functionality, hopefully ensuring that the digitised content will be accessible for many years to come.
The true test of the Guidelines will come, of course, several years from now, but it is heartening to note both that a number of organisations running NOF–funded projects are voluntarily applying the Guidelines to other areas of their work, not funded by NOF, and that the Guidelines are being used as the basis of similar documents in other UK funding programmes and in those of other countries, such as Canada.
So far as we are aware, this is the largest single body of funding ever granted for the digitisation of Cultural Heritage material. As such, it marks a hugely important step forward, both in creating a truly significant learning resource, but also in tackling a number of the open issues related to digitisation of cultural materials, the use to which those digitised resources are then put, and their long term value and sustainability.
As this article goes up on the Web, the first adverts for NOF–funded posts are already beginning to appear, and projects are beginning the process of tendering for systems and services. It is an open question as to whether the European digitisation market has sufficient capacity to meet the demand, and ways may need to be found to counter any significant inflation in prices brought about by this sudden rush of work.
This funding will create a resource of huge value. Allied to other NOF programmes devoted to installing computers and network access in Public Libraries, training teachers and librarians in the use of information technology, and providing opportunities for the general public to gain computing skills and confidence, this marks a significant step forward in Government agendas to move the UK online.
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Interoperability Focus
UKOLN
United Kingdom
p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/
Phone: +44 1482 466890
Paul Miller holds the post of Interoperability Focus at UKOLN. This post is jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC — http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
) of the United Kingdom's Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, and
by Resource, the Government agency responsible for libraries, museums and archives (http://www.resource.gov.uk/
).
Paul's background is in archaeology, where his PhD research examined the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in mapping deposits buried beneath modern cities, concentrating specifically upon the archaeologically rich and varied city of York.
In his current work, Paul is responsible for encouraging and facilitating the development of interoperable solutions
across a range of domains, principally museums, libraries, archives, and government. Paul sits on a wide range of committees
and working groups related to this area, both internationally (for example, the executive committees of the Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative (DCMI — http://www.dublincore.org/
) and the CIMI Consortium (CIMI — http://www.cimi.org/
) and within
the UK.
Previously, Paul worked for the Archaeology Data Service (ADS — http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/
), a
service provider of the UK Arts & Humanities Data Service. Here, he was responsible for designing and establishing the
catalogue, which now contains content from local and national archaeological agencies across the UK.
nof–digitise Technical Advisory Service
UKOLN
United Kingdom
s.criddle@ukoln.ac.uk
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/
Phone: +44 1225 826250
Sally Criddle is Resource Co–ordinator at UKOLN and is managing the Technical Advisory Service for NOF.
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For citation purposes:
Miller, P. and Criddle, S. "A True New Opportunity for Cultural Content Digitisation in the UK", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/nof/>
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By Concha Fernández de la Puente - October 2001
This section aims to provide news of the European Commission's initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content. Its objectives are to pinpoint the latest developments in programmes, projects and activities and to give a clear picture of progress in the area since the last issue. It certainly does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of what the EC is doing in the area but rather a short summary of some of the key items. The content is based largely on the information provided in the eCulture Newsletter, published by the European Commission, DG Information Society, Cultural Heritage Applications Unit [1].
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Over the summer, we have seen something of a slowdown in a number of the Commission's activities, however, we have greatly advanced in others.
As I have mentioned in earlier columns, the eEurope 2002 Action Plan defines one of its objectives as the stimulation of European content in global networks in order to fully exploit the opportunities created by the advent of digital technologies. This gave us a basis to organise a meeting on 4 April in Lund [2], supported by the Swedish Presidency of the European Union, that brought together experts from the Member States to identify ways in which a coordination mechanism for digitisation programmes across the Member States could be put in place to stimulate European content in global networks.
A second meeting of Member States' representatives was held under the aegis of the Belgian Presidency in Brussels on 17 July 2001. This meeting discussed a number of topics arising out of the previous meeting and continuing work. These included benchmarking as a means of providing support for improving policies and programmes, identification of standards and of guidelines in support of good practice and interoperability and national programmes and support for training and skills.
A major outcome of the Brussels meeting was the consensus that quality criteria for sites delivering cultural content is a core issue, supporting confidence and trust from the user and enabling institutions to express the work done in developing their sites and the high quality of their content in a discoverable way. The objective is not to regulate cultural content on the Web, but to provide a framework that describes quality in terms of the underlying technical characteristics provided by individual sites or subject gateways and in terms of the quality of service provided to the users. The Spanish participants in these meetings have shown great interest in this initiative and there is an strong will to continue supporting it during the Spanish Presidency (1st half 2002).
In conjunction with the eEurope activities, the Belgian Presidency and the European Commission are jointly organising a high-level ministerial Conference on eGovernment: "From Policy to Practice" [3], that will take place in Brussels from 29-30 November 2001. The conference aims to show how citizens and businesses can reap concrete benefits from on-line public services and to demonstrate where Europe currently stands in this fast moving field, as well as provide a framework to address eGovernment issues beyond the 2002 eEurope Action Plan. Finally, it will see the launch of the European eGovernment Prize contest.
Meanwhile, the eEurope+ Action Plan [4], launched last June targetting the CEE countries, is similar to the action plan covering the EU Member States, but with additions and changes of objectives, actions and timetables to reflect the economic and social situation of the candidate countries.
In 2000, we called for proposals on an action line entitled: Trials on new access models to cultural and scientific content. This focused on launching trial actions across Europe to encourage take-up of results and stimulate the implementation of innovative new products and services in the cultural heritage sector. From this call, we have selected 25 take-ups that are now starting work [5]. They cover some of the main issues related to local and regional memory organisations: virtual conservation of Irish sites of cultural and historical importance, Italian heterogeneous historical archives, a Web-based resource on European puppetry, inter-library loan of old and rare books, 3D photographic internet access to Italian research laboratories, digital recording to provide a Web resource displaying European historic gardens and parks, etc.
This call for trial actions has been considered by many as a very worthwhile initiative that has the potential to create European-wide momentum for innovation in cultural institutions. Our intention is to ensure replicability of results by concertation of trials during the life-time of these projects and to encourage case studies or examples of good practice and dissemination of results.
In this connection, we are launching TRIS, a specific support measure aiming at bringing all these projects together in the most effective way, by ensuring that the different projects meet, exchange their experiences and develop common approaches to key challenges facing their institutions.
In June we evaluated the 6th IST call for proposals, the call for the cultural heritage sector had two action lines: AL III.1.2 Heritage for All, that invited proposals to present projects that would foster sustainable online communities in creating and documenting the digital record of their societies, including safeguarding its accessibility for the future; and AL III.1.3 Next Generation digital collections, that invited proposals in the area of advanced digital libraries applications, including integration of virtual reality (VR) and visualisation technologies into DL models, with a focus on access to distributed cultural and scientific collections and on thematic and collaborative use of these collections. A continuous submission scheme area was also open. In total, 89 proposals were received for the cultural heritage sector and 15 have been retained (10 RTD and 5 support measures). These projects are in negotiation and will start at the beginning of 2001.
While we are negotiating the 6th IST call, the 7th call has been launched and will close on 17 October 2001 [6]. Although there aren't any actions open directly for the cultural heritage area, our sector might be involved in some of the open ones: AL.III.4.1 Semantic Web echnologies, aiming at enabling users to access, retrieve and filter information from the Web relevant to their interests and needs; AL.III.5.1 x-Content futures, aiming at providing opportunities for high payoff breakthrough research covering issues not covered at present by KA3; AL.III.5.2 Competence building; or AL.VIII.1.6 Enabling RTD cooperation with Newly Associated States. This last action line allows the extension of existing IST contracts with CEE partners. The objectives are to build awareness of IST and facilitate the formation of project consortia that include partners from the Newly Associated States, to better link the Newly Associated States' IST research base to that of the EU and vice versa and to support and develop more efficient means of co-operation with these countries. The types of actions addressed are research and development, demonstration and combined projects, thematic networks and accompanying measures.
The IST programme is also expanding in geographic terms. Negotiations of the agreement associating Malta were concluded last December. Since 1 March 2001, this country is eligible to participate to the programme and benefit from EU funding. Also, the EC and the Mexican National Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT) have signed an agreement for cooperative research between Mexican and European organisations under the IST programme.
IST is now preparing its work programme for 2002. One of the emerging topics for culture is creativity. A workshop on Technology Platforms for Cultural and Artistic Creative Expression [7] took place in Darmstand (Germany) on 21 May 2001. The conclusions highlighted the importance of interfaces allowing users to interact directly with content, respect for local culture, the need to involve artists in projects, the necessity of focusing on end users, and the need for a network of excellence in this area to support and catalyse exchanges between cultural/artistic and technical communities. The recommendations from the workshop will be used to help establish future priorities in this area.
The Commission is also preparing the definition and content of the Sixth Framework Programme. A Web-based consultation process has been set up for FP6 [8]. If you think that eCulture is an important topic, then this is one of the places where you can express your opinion.
In order to gain ideas for the cultural area of FP6, the 1st workshop on "Intelligent Cultural Heritage under FP6" [9], Rostock (Germany) 21 September 2001, had the objectives of facilitating information exchange and community building among IST projects under FP5 addressing intelligent cultural heritage and of encouraging discussion and gathering input from research, cultural heritage actors and national/regional policy makers with regard to Intelligent Cultural Heritage (ICH) research themes and priorities under FP6 (2002-2006).
At the recent EVA Conferences, the EC has encouraged the participants to give their opinions on future European research in the cultural heritage area. The input has been collected in The Florence Agenda [10]. This document was presented and discussed during the EVA Glasgow Conference that took place last July and we are just about to produce The Glasgow Response.
The third edition of the DLM-Forum on electronic records, with the title DLM - FORUM 2002: @ccess and preservation of electronic information: best practices and solutions, and its exhibition, will take place in Barcelona (Spain) from 7 to 8 May 2002. The DLM-Forum on Electronic Records [11] is an international and multidisciplinary forum which aim is to promote projects for the improvement of electronic records management and long-term preservation in the organizations. The DLM-Forum is also a reference point for the coordination of electronic records management's policies carrying out in the member states of the European Union, for the establishment of access and long-term storage standards, and for the implication of private sector agents in searching solutions for electronic records problems. The 2002 forum is being organised by the Secretariat for the Information Society of the Catalan government together with other Catalan institutions and departments of the Spanish central government, and with the support of the European Commission. The forum sessions will be concentrated around a number of key topics: the Memory of the Information Age: Preservation, Migration & Long-term Availability; The Use of Public Information: Security, Protection & Control; The Improvement of Knowledge Access: Education for Experts & Public Users; Exploring Records & Archives: Metadata & Standardisation; Dissemination of Content: Best Practice in Solution Scalability & Easy-to-Use-Access; and Capturing Knowledge: High Volume Information Transformation & Automatic Indexing.
Moving to the latest developments of the eContent [12] programme, as a result of the call for proposals for preparatory actions published on 20 April 2000, 28 projects have been chosen to stimulate the development and use of European Digital Content on the global networks and to promote the linguistic diversity in the Information Society. Some of the selected projects relevant to the cultural heritage area are: PSINet, that will build on the European Green Paper on Government Information in the Information Society, to provide a clear definition and typology of public sector information, to explore access issues and identify good practice, and to establish a framework for a future European Public Sector Information Network; MNM (Minority Newspapers to New Media); and MUDICU (Multilingual Digital Culture Web Project).
In the last five DIGICULT columns I have attempted to give you an overview of the EC initiatives addressing cultural heritage in a digital environment. These initiatives have been reviewed as perceived from the Cultural Heritage Applications unit of the DG Information Society where I have worked for the past five years and where I have gained considerable experience of the sector. Now it is time for me to move on and I am leaving DG Information Society to take up a post in another Commission service. I would therefore like to say goodbye to all those who have followed this section and thank you for your loyalty and support in my work. In October 2001, I will be joining EuropeAid - Cooperation Office, where I shall be working in the area of regional programmes for the Southern Mediterranean and Middle East countries [13]. I hope I will have the opportunity of working with you or addressing you again in the framework of my new responsibilities.
Goodbye!
Concha Fernández de la Puente
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Concha
Fernández de la Puente
European Commission
DG Information Society
Cultural Heritage Applications
concha.fpuente@cec.eu.int
<http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/>
The information provided does not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Commission.
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For citation purposes:
Fernández de la Puente, C. "DIGICULT Column", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/digicult/>
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By Karin Hafner - October 2001
From the beginning of March until the end of June of this year, The Cultural Service Centre Austria (CSC), the National Node for Austria, organized six major information events for interested parties from museums, libraries, archives and other cultural heritage institutions. The organization of these successful events was possible due to close collaboration with the bm:bwk - Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur (the federal ministry for education, science and culture), which grants national support to the Austrian Cultivate Node. Karin Hafner of CSC Austria talks about who presented at the events and how they were received.
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The first of the Austrian Cultivate events for 2001 took place on 5 March in Graz, where the office of CSC Austria is located. It was a Regional Information Day entitled EU-funding for cultural heritage projects in the 5th Framework Programme and Culture 2000/Regionaler Informationstag: EU-Foerderungen für Kulturprojekte im 5. Rahmenprogramm und Kultur 2000.
The organization of the event was carried out by CSC Austria in their role as the national commission for Cultivate-EU, together with the government of the Federal State of Styria (Landesamtsdirektion, EU-Koordinationsstelle) and APS-European Programmes for Technologies and Training.
The aim of the event was to raise awareness of EU-projects (5th Framework Programme of the EU and Culture 2000) among people from memory institutions and to point out the advantages and possibilities of the integration of modern ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in the field of cultural heritage. The program was diversified. It started, after an opening by Gerhard Weilinger from the government of the Federal State of Styria, with lectures from representatives of the Austrian national government (Rudolf Novak from the Bundeskanzleramt and Liselotte Haschke from the bm:bwk) on issues of the Culture 2000 programme. Afterwards, examples of successful Austrian EU-project submissions in the field of digital cultural heritage were presented by Erich Prem from BIT (Bureau for International Research and Technology Cooperation), which is the Austrian centre offering services to participants in European and international programmes, actions and initiatives for co-operation in research, technological development and demonstration (RTD).
Later Walter Koch, president of CSC Austria, spoke about the accompanying measure, Cultivate, and Key Action III of Digicult (IST Programme). Barbara Haselsteiner from APS-European Programmes for Technologies and Training informed the audience about the APS´ services for proposers of EU projects. Gerda Koch from AIT-Applied Information Techniques Research Ltd finally presented the REGNET Project (Cultural Heritage in REGional NETworks), another example of a successful Austrian EU-RTD-project in the cultural heritage field.
Over 100 people attended the event and the wide spectrum of themes related to EU cultural heritage projects formed a good start for the season of events.
The next event to take place was a specialized Seminar on the Digitisation of Audio Materials (Seminar: Digitalisierung von Audiomaterialien) in Vienna, on 3 May, aimed at non-specialists. The event was organised by CSC Austria along with the Austrian Mediathek of the Technical Museum of Vienna (Technisches Museum Wien mit Oesterreichischer Mediathek) and the Phonogram Archive of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (Phonogrammarchiv der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften).
Walter Koch from CSC Austria opened the seminar with his lecture on Digitisation projects for the IST Programme of the European Union. Rainer Hubert from the Oesterreichische Mediathek contributed more general information on digitisation of audio material and Dietrich Schueller from the Phonogrammarchiv der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften spoke about long-term disposability of audio materials (from cylinders and shellac discs over vinyl discs, tapes and cassettes to CDs and CD-ROMs). His lecture was followed by contributions from Franz Lechleitner and Nadja Wallaszkovits (both from the Phonogrammarchiv) relating to the extraction of signals of mechanical (cylinders, shellac discs and LPs) and magnetic sound storage mediums (audiotapes). Dietrich Schueller (Phonogrammarchiv) and Christophe Kummer (Noa Audio Solutions) explained Matters of digital resolution and formats (e.g. the BWF-Broadcast Wav File and the currently so popular mp3, a shrunken down type of audio file). Albrecht Haefner from the German broadcast station Suedwestrundfunk Baden-Baden discussed mass storage of audio data, which is possible through the use of very small storage cartridges that can save huge masses of data. His contribution was followed by a lecture from Michael Risnyovsky and D. Schueller (both from the Phonogrammarchiv) on interim solutions for the storage of audio data, like CD-ROMs, R-Dat and DLT-tapes.
Later on in the day the importance of Metadata and ontology for the documentation of audio-visual material was discussed in a further contribution from Walter Koch (CSC Austria) along with R. Hubert (Oesterreichische Mediathek) and A. Haefner (Suedwestrundfunk Baden-Baden).
Richard Goll from the Austrian broadcast station ORF reported on the ORF audio archive and the solutions applied there. He also explained three different types of archiving: offline, near line (mass storage with cache) and online. Finally the representatives from the Oesterreichische Mediathek and Noa Audio Solutions presented the digitisation project of the Oesterreichische Mediathek and demonstrated their developments.
Thanks to the highly qualified experts which shared their wisdom at this seminar it was a really instructive event for the 35 participants.
On 17 May CSC Austria and the bm:bwk – Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur (federal ministry for education, science and culture) organized an event for the Presentation of Collections Management and Documentation Systems for Memory Institutions (Sammlungsverwaltungs- und Dokumentationsprogramme für Bibliotheken, Museen, Archive – ein Informationsnachmittag). The event took place in the audience room of the Austrian Minister for Education, Science and Culture and 60 people attended. During the day seven organizations presented their solutions for collections management and documentation in memory institutions.
ADLIB Museum was introduced by Gerda Koch from AIT – Applied Information Techniques Research Ltd.(Graz, Austria). Martin Ueberegger from the company daten unlimited (Schwaz, Austria) brought in the product mbox. Pavla Stancikova from CEIT Ltd. (Bratislava, Slovakia) spoke about Union library catalogues and terminology databases based on CDS/ISIS on Internet. Joerg Herzog from B.O.N.D. Bibliothekssysteme (Boehl-Iggelheim, Germany) presented their product BIBLIOTECA 2000. The audience was also told about the Artefact programme by Jutta Jerlich and Frank Dechmann from CMB Informationslogistik GmbH (Vienna, Austria). Hans Petschar from the Austrian National Library reported on digitisation, indexation and Web presentation of catalogue cards with KatZoom, a programme developed by the Austrian National Library. The afternoon finished with the contribution of Walter Koch (CSC Austria) on the modular documentation system MODOK.
On the following day, 18 May, the First Austrian Metadata Seminar organised by CSC Austria and the bm:bwk took place in Vienna, again in the audience room of the bm:bwk. A number of highly qualified international experts on metadata met together for this specialised seminar, at which 35 people from Austria, Slovakia and Switzerland participated. After the opening speech from the host, Peter Seitz from the bm:bwk, Walter Koch gave an introduction to ontology and metadata and explained the concept of the presentation of an object. Angela Spinazze, Programs Manager for the CIMI Consortium (Computer Interchange of Museum Information), travelled all the way from Chicago to Vienna to speak about CIMI Metadata Projects and Standard Frameworks. She reported on the CHIO and Harmony projects, the Handscape test bed (delivery of museum information to palm devices) and the testing of the SPECTRUM XML DTD. Her contribution was followed by a presentation on the Schemas-project and other European projects in the field of Metadata (e.g. Renardus), given by Michael Day [1]. Michael works for UKOLN and is involved in the Schemas-project which provides a forum for metadata schema designers involved in projects under the IST Programme and national initiatives in Europe.
Information on Metadata from the point of view of a Systems Developer was provided by Bert Degenhart Drenth, the managing director of ADLIB Information Systems. He reported on ADLIB’s involvement with metadata (CIMI Z39.50 testbed, CIMI DC testbed, DC integration in ADLIB programmes) and argued on challenges faced by systems developers, like integrated searching through different data structures.
Mirna Willer from the National and University Library Zagreb reported on Experiences with Dublin Core in Croatia, which included the results of a survey on metadata use in Croatian e-serials. The final item on the agenda was Georg Güntner’s lecture on Distributed cross-domain search based on XML metadata and the IST project COVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML). Georg works for Salzburg Research and this organization acts as partner in the COVAX project. Between and after the lectures lively discussions evolved.
About a month later, on 21 June, a Digital Heritage Support Actions Concertation Event for DG Information Society, Cultural Heritage Applications unit of the European Commission was hosted by the bm:bwk and organized in collaboration with CSC Austria. 56 people from throughout Europe participated. The objectives of the event were to discuss issues relating to the current IST support actions and to look into emerging trends and future needs of these types of actions.
Peter Seitz from the bm:bwk welcomed the audience. Thomas Boesser from ACit - Advance Concepts for interactive technology GmbH, Germany, who had adopted the function of the rapporteur, gave a thematic introduction and then handed over to Bernard Smith from the European Commission, who presented an Overview of different types of non research initiatives and trends for the 6th Framework Programme of the EU.
Session 1 of the Concertation event was lead by David Fuegi from MDR Partners (United Kingdom) and was entitled “Networks of Excellence / Coordination with national programmes / International cooperation”. In the course of his session he presented the DELOS (C. Peters, Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy), PULMAN (D. Fuegi, MDR Partners, UK), ELSNET (S. Krauwer, ELSNET/UiL OTS, The Netherlands) and DLM-Forum projects.
Flavio Tariffi from Atlantis S.p.A. (Italy) led Session 2: “Legal issues / Socioeconomic frame / Business models / Technology transfer”. Flavio presented the TRIS project. L. Goodman (The Institute for New Media Performance Research, UK) introduced RADICAL and G. Stanke (Gesellschaft zur Förderung angewandter Informatik e.V., Germany) lectured on the EVAN project. The LIBECON (D. Fuegi, MDR Partners, UK), CLEF (C. Peters, Nazionale delle Ricerche, Italy) and PROACTE (T. Morris, Ecotec Trends and Consulting Ltd., Belgium) projects were also presented during the session.
The 3rd Session was on “Technical cooperation / Infrastructures and testbeds”, the session leader was Seamus Ross (HATII, UK). S. Krause from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum Nuernberg (Germany) talked about the CHIOS project and E.-M. Melchior from ACit - Advance Concepts for interactive technology GmbH (Germany) presented TEL and VNET5.
“Information and dissemination / Mobility, skills and training” was the topic of the 4th and last session lead by Walter Koch from CSC Austria. During the session the following projects were presented: CULTIVATE (K. Hafner, CSC – Cultural Service Centre Austria), CELIP (S. Ianeva, American Center, Bulgaria), HEREIN (N. Dautier, FEMP, France) and DIFFUSE (M. Bryan, SGML Centre, UK). Thomas Bösser moderated the final debate and wrapped up the event [2].
On the following day the last of the 6 events took place, a National Information Day was given on behalf of the Austrian CULTIVATE Node. This event was also hosted by the bm:bwk and was organized by a collaboration between the bm:bwk and CSC Austria. The topic of the National Information Day for Archives, Libraries and Museums 2001 was “The 6th Framework Programme of the European Union / The national implementation of EU-projects in Austria: results and cognitions”.
After the welcome speech from Peter Seitz (bm:bwk) the first lecture was given by Bernard Smith (Head of Unit, DG Information Society, European Commission). He introduced the 6th Framework Programme and also focused on Cultural Heritage in the 6th FP and pointed out, that the effort for cultural heritage will concentrate on intelligent systems for dynamic access to and preservation of tangible and intangible cultural scientific resources. After his lecture followed a contribution from Bernd Wohlkinger (BIT Bureau for International Research and Technology Cooperation). He presented several Austrian success stories from the 5th Framework Programme which could be used as a basis for the 6th Framework Programme.
After the discussion of the fundamental issues of the 6th Framework Programme representatives from the Austrian main organizations and institutions in the area of libraries, museums and archives expressed their opinions about IST-projects. These representatives were Sigrid Reinitzer, President of VOeB-Vereinigung Oesterreichischer Bibliothekare (association of Austrian librarians); Lorenz Mikoletzky, General Director of the Austrian State Archive; Gerhard Jagschitz, President of AGAVA – Arbeitsgemeinschaft audiovisueller Archive Oesterreichs (working group of the audio-visual archives in Austria); Daniel Wisser from BVOe – Buechereiverband Oesterreichs (library association of Austria); Gerhard Richter, President of the OeGDI – Oesterreichische Gesellschaft für Dokumentation und Information (Austrian organization for documentation and information); Otmar Moritsch from the Technical Museum Vienna and Gerhard K. Wagner, secretary general of the VIW – Verband für Informationswirtschaft in Oesterreich (organization for information industry in Austria). They all shared their rich experience in the area of cultural heritage and presented their reflections and conclusions concerning IST-projects.
In the afternoon two Austrian projects relating to digitisation and networking of cultural heritage were presented. Hans Zotter from the University Library of Graz reported on the digitisation of mediaeval manuscripts at the University Library Graz in his lecture “Electronic Manuscript Library" and the projects ALO, meta-e and books2you were presented by Klaus Miesenberger from i3s3-Informatik fuer Blinde/computer science for blind men, University of Linz.
The rest of the afternoon was devoted to CULTIVATE. After a lecture by Walter Koch (CSC Austria) on “Cultivate a cultural heritage network for the whole of Europe and Russia”, several Cultivate National Nodes were introduced. Karin Hafner (CSC Austria) gave a report on the activities of the Austrian National Node; Pascale van Dinter (STIS – Scientific and Technical Information Service, Belgium) discussed National Node activities in Belgium; Torill Redse (Riksbibliotekjenesten - National Office for Research Documentation, Academic and Special Libraries, Norway) introduced herself as the Norwegian National Node and Maria Sliwinska (University Torun, Poland) reported on the build-up of the Polish National Node activities. A general discussion on CULTIVATE activities concluded the Austrian National Information Day 2001 [3].
The Austrian National Node plans to continue this series of information events in late autumn 2001 and winter 2001/2002 [4].
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Karin
Hafner
CSC Austria
karin.hafner@cscaustria.at
http://www.cscaustria.at/members/hafner/karin.html
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For citation purposes:
Hafner, K. "National Node Column: Austria", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/nodes/>
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By Monica Bonett - October 2001
The 5th conference in the series of European Conferences on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries was held in Darmstadt, Germany between 4 and 9 September 2001. Monica Bonett attended on behalf of the IMesh Toolkit Project, and reports on some of the activities.
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The first day offered a number of tutorials, followed by three days of presentations and panels. Workshops were held on the last two days. A number of posters and demonstrations were also presented.
In the first invited talk, "Digital Libraries - Panacea or Recreational Chemical", Mike Keller of Stanford University reflected on the feats and failures of the Internet in transforming the Information Age. Keller charted the rise, trajectory and fall of the dot.coms, attributing their fate to 3 fallacies on which dot.coms were built: early innovators will predominate, consumers' behaviour will change rapidly, and faulty business models. Drawing parallels between the economic and the digital library worlds, Keller asked whether digital libraries are surfing on the now-defunct dot.com wave. He made a graphic comparison of the Web's present state of organisation, as he sees it. If the Web is compared to a mound of rubbish, then the tools currently in use (search engines) operate with the precision and sensitivity of a tractor sifting through the mound.
On Thursday, Eric Miller from the W3C delivered the second invited talk, "Digital Libraries and the Semantic Web". Miller first explained the goals of the Semantic Web, then gave an overview of Semantic Web activity at the W3C, followed by an outline of Semantic Web principles. An example of how the Resource Description Framework (RDF) was used to to automate the creation and maintenance of the W3C TR page was described. RDF is one of the enabling technologies proposed by the W3C for building the Semantic Web. Finally, the speaker voiced his belief that technical and social areas of overlap between digital libraries and the Semantic Web can be identfied, and memory organisations such as museums and archives, together with digital libraries can provide key foundations for supporting the Semantic Web. Slides for this presentation are available online [1].
The third invited speaker was Dr. Türkay of the Senckenberg Museum (Frankfurt). The talk provided a lucidly-explained example of the complexities of coping with changes in descriptive data over time. The application area being described was the classification of species. As new species are identified or known species are redefined, specimens may need to be reassigned to a different species. This gives rise to the requirement of keeping track of the date or period of specimen classification, since the interpretation of the statement Specimen A is of Species B is dependant on the time and/or context when the statement was made. The solutions considered in the talk were all database-driven; from my understanding, the above is exactly the kind of scenario in which RDF is expected to play a significant role, particularly for interoperability, and I would have liked to see some discussion on the suitability (or otherwise) of deploying RDF to tackle this problem.
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| In the ECDL 2001 presentations Hall |
One focus chosen for the conference theme was "the on-going convergence of libraries, archives, and museums into integrated digital information spaces on science, art, and history". In addition to the invited talk which dealt with museum data, other museum-related work featured in the programme included a presentation [2] on the production of museum exhibitions using different presentation styles. Using XSL-based technology, different exhibitions can be composed from the same set of digital artifacts, and presented according to user group. Different styles of exhibition can be provided for adults, children, experts, novices, high-bandwidth users and low-bandwith users.
However, an overall personal point of view is that the proposed theme was not actually tackled in the conference. The reason for this may be that, as the chairpersons themselves note in their introductory statement [3], "This process [of convergence] seems, important as it is, to be only at its beginning."
On the other hand, the applications of digital library systems and their integration into practical work, another focus proposed for the conference theme, was well represented. Anne Adams [4] presented a study undertaken to understand the social and organisational impacts of introducing digital libraries in the wards of a hospital. A prototype of a system to be developed in Singapore [5] was built to show how to organise resources relevant to a particular task. The task chosen for the prototype is that of preparing a Masters Dissertation at the school of Computer Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The prototype focuses on a particular task to illustrate the task-oriented concept for information access. The use of collections and services to support student learning activities is being studied in the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT) Project. Two presentations [6], [7] related to this project were delivered, both of which had a strong user focus. Michael Khoo [8] gave an ethnographical viewpoint, reporting on his investigations into designers' and users' understandings of digital libraries, and the consequences of differences in their viewpoints for library design and development.
In this conference, the issue of preservation, whilst being identified as an urgent and challenging problem, was dealt with from two very different angles. Michael Day [9] of UKOLN reviewed recent developments in the use of preservation metadata for digital objects, stressing the role of organisational (and other non-technical) solutions, and providing several examples of projects on preservation metadata in libraries and beyond. A mathematical framework for analyzing the problem of preservation was proposed by Cheney et al. [10].
The conference was well-attended, with over 250 registrants, including several well known figures from the field of digital library research. In addition to the formal programme, several impromptu and informal meetings took place among participants, not least those arising from spontaneous discussions and friendships, made in a bierkeller whilst sampling some of the local fare. The proceedings [3] are published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science series (2163) and are available online [11].
The IMesh Toolkit Project <http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/> is funded by JISC/NSF under the DLI2 initiative.
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Monica
Bonett
Software Developer, Research and Development
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
M.Bonett@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Phone: +44 1225 826826
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For citation purposes:
Bonett, M. "5th European Conference, ECDL 2001: Research and Advanced Technology for Digitial Libraries", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/ecdl/>
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By Michael Day - October 2001
Michael Day reports on the First Austrian Metadata Seminar [1], Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Kultur, held in Vienna on 18 May 2001.
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On 18th May 2001 I attended the First Austrian Metadata Seminar in Vienna. The seminar attracted about 40-50 attendees, mostly from Austria, but also including some people from Slovakia and Switzerland. The meeting was held in a richly decorated room in the Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Culture.
The workshop started with a welcome by Dr. Peter Seitz of the Ministry. Then Professor Walter Koch (CSC Austria, Graz) introduced the day with a presentation entitled "Ontology and metadata." In this he defined ontology as "an explicit, agreed specification about a shared conceptualisation" and compared this with definitions of metadata. Using some images of meaning triangles [2], the presentation looked briefly at object-oriented approaches to the semantics of meaning. Koch also introduced some DC-based mappings undertaken as part of the MODOK project. He noted that the real problem with mapping was accurately mapping the semantics of different schemes.
This was followed by a description by Angela Spinazze (CIMI) of CIMI projects and initiatives. These included CIMI collaboration with the Harmony project, the testing of the mda's SPECTRUM XML DTD, an initiative called "Handscape" that is investigating the use of wireless technologies for museum visitors and a CIMI-based test of the OAI protocol. Ms. Spinazze also gave some information on some forthcoming CIMI Institute events, including the CIMI-MCN conference to be held in Cincinnati in October, and implementers workshops on OAI and the SPECTRUM XML DTD to be held respectively in Milan (on the tutorial program at ICHIM01 in September) and Cincinnati.
My presentation on the SCHEMAS project followed this. I gave a fairly long presentation on European metadata developments and the SCHEMAS project. After a brief introduction to metadata, I looked in more detail at interoperability issues, subject gateways (with greater detail on the RDN and the Renardus project) and preservation metadata. My attempt was to give some indication of the variety of metadata initiatives that exist before introducing the SCHEMAS project itself.
After lunch, there was a presentation by Bart Degenhart Drenth (ADLiB Information Systems) on metadata from the point of a system developer. He argued that the term metadata should really only be used for data used for resource discovery (e.g. using the Dublin Core as a cross-domain element set) and not for other descriptive data, e.g. catalogue records. Metadata, therefore, should live alongside this other data and should be hidden from the user, described as deploying metadata by stealth. There was also a quick look at Z39.50 (not particularly useful for museum data), the OAI, and XML - described as the natural vehicle to support DC metadata because of its apparent longevity.
This was followed by a presentation by Mirna Willer (National and University Library, Zagreb, Croatia) on some experiences with DC in Croatia. This concentrated on interoperability issues (including mapping) and described the results of a survey on the presence of metadata in Croatian e-serials.
The final presentation was by Georg Güntner of Salzburg Research on the COVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archives in XML) project [3]. This provided a general introduction to the project, with more detail on the system architecture and metadata conversions being used in the project. The project is forming a service that will broker (using Z39.50) to a network of distributed XML repositories.
Depending upon demand, there may be further workshops in this series. PowerPoint files of the presentations are available online [1].
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Michael
Day
Research Officer (Metadata)
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
m.day@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Phone: +44 1225 826724
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For citation purposes:
Day, M. "The First Austrian Metadata Seminar", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/austrian/>
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By David Johns - October 2001
In a follow up to last issue’s Streaming Video articles David Johns of Culturejam limited [1], a company who specialise in optimising video and audio for the Web, introduces the art of encoding.
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The world is becoming a digital environment. The records we create are all stored as millions of "ones" and "zeros". Radio, TV, home entertainment, even the telephone - they're all digital now.
Yet there is confusion in the marketplace about what "being digital" actually means. Many seem to believe that once something is converted to digital it can be conveyed via any digital transmission or delivery medium with no further work.
Whilst true in theory, the practice is far from being so simple; the different distribution and viewing media - Internet, digital TV, DVD, mobile devices and so on - all require content to be individually optimised for their specific characteristics. So even newly-created digital material usually requires adjustment for its intended purpose.
Meanwhile, what about the vast array of legacy material which was both created and stored in older formats? Long-playing vinyl records? Analogue video and audio tapes? Quite simply, they’re destined for a slow decay into oblivion and with them their precious value.
There is a means to prevent this however: conversion into a more stable form, a form able to withstand future copying without any loss of quality. Unsurprisingly, that means digital.
News footage, corporate communication libraries, video archives, TV and radio commercials, sound effects, stock footage, showreels - all can have their value preserved for the future via digitising. To be done properly, this process require substantial investment in professional equipment and skills.
This article describes those processes and hopefully explains why good quality digitising and encoding is not just "something which anyone can do" (a popular myth, thanks to the widespread availability of low cost one-button encoding software). For further explanation of all terms used in this article see the Culturejam glossary [2].
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| The Culturejam Web site |
First of all, the audio-visual (A/V) content has to be brought into a computer system. This is called digitising. Then it's edited - partly according to how you want it to look, partly to optimise it for the encoding process - and finally it's encoded. After this last step, the encoded media can be stored on CD-R or DVD, or even copied onto a server which will transmit the material across the Internet.
Once the A/V source material has been received it needs to be copied onto the computer system so that it can be edited and/or encoded. In the dim, dark days of analogue tape, this required a conversion from analogue to digital and hence the process became known as "digitising". Today, even though many modern tape formats already store the audio and video digitally, the process of bringing it into a computer is still commonly referred to as digitising.
Digitising generally happens in "real time" which is to say, it takes as long to do as there is material. One hour of material takes one hour to digitise. Ten hours takes ten hours and so on.
However you also have to allow a bit of time for each item that requires digitising because the machine operator has to open the tape, put it in the machine, give the machine a name to store the file under, find and mark the start and end points, start the computer digitising and at the end, pull the tape out and re-file it in the right place. Even if they're all on the same tape, there's a certain amount of stop-starting so as to give each clip its own filename on the computer system.
Some digitising systems bring the material in 'uncompressed', that is, unaltered from its original form. For video, this requires substantial and expensive hardware due to the sheer volume of data involved (see later). Other systems apply a mild form of data compression and encoding straight away, in order to make the amount of data more manageable.
From an operational point of view, encoding at this point is effectively transparent as far as the user is concerned but it does have a bearing on the final encoding quality, so the lower the compression you can get away with when digitising, the better.
Editing for multi-media playback comprises two elements. First there's traditional editing - cutting the source material into something well-produced that tells the story you wish to tell.
For traditional broadcast, that would be the end of the story but for multi-media applications there's an extra step - modifying the material so that after it's encoded, it is presented in the most appropriate manner possible.
An example of this is with captions. A typical TV item may well have name captions strapped across the bottom of the screen to identify the speaker. Yet if that same picture is encoded for Internet transmission, the caption will probably be unreadable due to the small size of Internet video windows (see 'encoding' for details of why Internet video is generally smaller than full-screen TV quality). Hence it makes sense to place a much larger, Web-friendly caption over the video when creating a Web-edit version.
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| An editor at his Media100 system |
There are many similar techniques that may be required, from re-drawing on-screen graphics and diagrams to zooming in on parts of the video screen to prevent items being miniaturised to invisibility after encoding.
Encoding is a two stage process, comprising processing and then the encoding itself.
This has a bit of crossover with the second editing stage; that is, some things can either be done in the edit or as a separate processing step.
Processing includes colour, contrast and brightness modification, audio level adjustment and EQ (bass and treble, in simple terms) plus other similar tweaks. The aim is to sweeten the A/V such that once it's been through the encoding process it looks and sounds as good as it can.
Unfortunately, this step can have to be done more than once because each type of encoding may require slightly different processing in order to achieve the best result.
Here's where it gets complicated. There are numerous formats into which audio and video files can be encoded, with different ones being applicable to different applications or simply being competing formats in the same field. The table below lists the most common encoding formats and codecs
NOTE: there is a difference between a format and a codec - but sometimes they go hand in hand inherently. A format refers to a particular way of storing the encoded data; a codec ("compressor / de-compressor") refers to a computer program which implements a mathematical formula for converting the data from one type to another, often with a reduction in the amount of data needed to represent the original information.
Encoded data has to be stored in one format or other, it doesn't stand alone - but sometimes the format and codec are so inextricably linked, you can refer to them both by the same term and they would never be associated with anything else. See "Real Video" and "Windows Media" for examples, below.
| Term | Format or codec? | Typical use |
| Real Video or Real Audio | Both. The Real software includes multiple codecs, all of which are proprietary to Real hence they go hand-in-hand with the Real format. | Internet video and audio |
| Windows Media | Both, for the same reasons as Real, above. | Internet video and audio |
| QuickTime | Format - it can store data encoded with a variety of codecs. There is only one codec generally used for QuickTime video streaming though, and that's Sorenson. | From Internet video up to broadcast-quality video editing, depending on the codec chosen. |
| AVI | Format - but never used for streaming. For that, Microsoft, who invented AVI (it's part of Windows), came up with Windows Media instead. | From CD-ROM video up to broadcast-quality video editing, depending on the codec chosen. |
| M-JPEG | Codec | Broadcast-quality video editing. |
| Sorenson | Codec - universally used with the QuickTime format. | Internet video and CD-ROM video |
| Cinepak | Codec, used for AVI and QuickTime | CD-ROM video |
| Indeo | Codec, used for AVI and QuickTime | CD-ROM video |
| On2 VPx (eg VP4) | Codec | Internet video |
| ZyGo Video | Codec, used in QuickTime | Internet video |
| MPEG-1 | Both | Some parts of digital TV, also video CDs and Internet video downloads |
| MPEG-2 | Both | DVD video & digital television |
| MPEG-4 | Both | Any device, from mobile phone handsets to broadcast-quality TV. Not in widespread use yet. |
| mp3 | Both. Note that this is not the same as MPEG-3 (there is no MPEG 3). It actually stands for "MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3" | Audio only, widely used for distribution of music on the Internet. |
| Ogg Vorbis | Both. | Audio only. A new (and free!) codec trying to rival mp3 for music distribution. |
| Qdesign Music | Codec. | Audio only. Used with QuickTime (and often paired with Sorenson on the video side) |
The next technical thing to bear in mind is bitrates. The bitrate is the rate at which bits of data (the ones and zeros that represent all things digital) can be sent or received down a particular communications link, or read from a given storage device.
For example, a typical home PC user has a 56k modem. What this means is that the theoretical maximum rate at which that modem can send or receive data is 56,000 bits per second (aka 56kbps). Contrast this with even a lowly single-speed CD-ROM, which provides a data-reading rate of 1,200,000 bits per second (aka 1.2 Mbps).
(note: in truth, a 56k modem cannot achieve 56k except in a lab. In reality, 56k modems usually max out at 40-45kbps. Also, they can't transmit at 56k, they're limited to 33kbps-ish)
Why is this important? Because in order for the viewer to be able to watch the content, it has to be encoded at no greater than the fastest rate the viewer's storage device or communications link can provide. It's like trying to empty Lake Geneva; if you've only got a 1-inch hosepipe to drain it with, you're going to be waiting a long, long time. If you build 60-metre diameter drainpipes, it'll empty a lot faster.
Of course, not everyone uses 56k modems. Some people use ISDN, others have ADSL, many companies have leased lines. Some content will be stored on CD-ROM, some on DVD. In short, each possibility has to be taken into account and encoding performed accordingly. Note that although many new PCs now come equipped with high speed (x40) CD-ROM drives, older PCs won't have them so you really need to encode for the lowest common denominator.
This table describes the various data rates most commonly encountered:
| Connection | Theoretical speed | Realistic speed | Typical user |
| 28k modem | 28 kbps | 25 kbps | Home or home worker |
| 33k modem | 33 kbps | 29 kbps | Home or home worker |
| 56k modem | 56 kbps | 45 kbps | Home or home worker |
| ISDN | 64 kbps or 128 kbps | 64 kbps or 128 kbps | Enthusiastic home user; more likely home worker or small business |
| ADSL | From 512 kbps to 2 Mbps | Impossible to say! (see below) | Home user or small business |
| Leased line | Various types available from 64 kbps up to 622 Mbps | Exactly what it says on the tin. | Corporate. |
| Ethernet LAN | Various, usually 10 Mbps or 100 Mbps | 7 Mbps / 70 Mbps | Within offices |
| CD-ROM (single speed) | 1.2 Mbps | 1.2 Mbps | Anyone |
| DVD-ROM (single speed) | 11 Mbps | 11 Mbps | Anyone with a modern PC |
(ADSL note: the way ADSL works is that everyone gets UP TO the maximum rate, depending on how many others are trying to use it at the same time (at the line exchange, not in the same office). Hence you might get 512kbps out of a 512kbps line but if 10 people are all trying to watch material via the same line at the exchange, they'll each get 51.2kbps. This is referred to as 'contention')
It's also important to note that for the communications lines, the quoted "realistic" speeds are when considered "point-to-point" (ie the speed from one end of the line to the other). The other end of the line connects to the tangled mess that is the Internet so the actual data rate that manages to flow across the Internet and then down that connection may be much less than you expect. This has to be taken into account when encoding too.
For some of the formats/codecs, bitrate is not an issue as it's standardised. For example, MPEG-1 VideoCDs use 1.2Mbps. DVD MPEG-2 ranges from 4-9Mbps but this is usually dependant on the material being encoded, not the end-user.
Bitrate is critical for Internet downloads and streaming. It is common to encode the same file at three or so different bitrates so that it's suitable for a variety of audiences but it's still important to know what the likely audience is so that the best judgement as to what those bitrates should be can be made.
The key thing to remember is that the lower the bitrate, the harder it is for the codec to represent the audio or video in the given number of bits each second. If you try to encode a full-screen video at 25 frames per second (normal TV rate) such that it would play down a 28kbps line - well, it won't work. Here's why:
Full frame video is 768 pixels (dots) wide by 576 high. Each pixel takes 24 bits to describe its colour (8 for red, 8 for green, 8 for blue - all other colours are combinations of those three). There are 25 full frames each second. That's 768 x 576 x 24 x 25 = 265,420,800 bits per second.
So to send that amount of information down a line with a capacity of 28,000 bits per second (and in reality, no more than 25,000 bits per second), the video information will have to be squeezed by a factor of 265,420,800 / 25,000 = 10,617
That's a lot of compression!
To achieve this, video codecs take some shortcuts. First the video is re-sized to a more manageable level (for example, Internet transmission often uses 192 x 144 - a sixteenth of full-size). Immediately, the compression required drops (using that same example, to just 664 times). Next, the frame rate is dropped, typically by half to 12.5 frames each second. Yes, this makes the video look a bit jerky but you can't have everything. The compression required for Internet video is then just 331 times.
At this point, the codec starts to do its work by using some very complicated mathematics which tries to represent that data in an even more compact way; codecs usually do this (in simple terms) by comparing frames and only storing the differences between them rather than all the information shown. Lo and behold, you end up with sufficiently little data that you can send it down a modem and reconstruct the video at the other end!
The drawback of the maths part is that some of the detail is lost and the video can look 'blocky' and 'blotchy'. It tends to have trouble with fast-moving scenes (when there is a lot of difference in movement between the frames).
Of course, the higher the bitrate, the lower the amount of squishing that has to be done, so the better the quality. Also, each new generation of codec results in noticeable improvements in quality for a given bitrate, thanks to legions of boffins whose purpose in life is to invent better mathematics for us.
The appetite for digital information is never going to decline and neither is the number of formats in which digital content will be viewed. With the world being an analogue place, there will inherently be a continual need for digitisation to take place.
Equally, it is human nature to demand more for less, such as more data in less space. Hence parallel to the demand for digitisation will be a continual demand for encoding. As the technology progresses, so the perceived quality of the encoding, and the efficiency of any associated compression, will increase.
A knowledge of the processes and technology involved will aid anyone involved in the field of digital information to ensure they are receiving the best results from either their own efforts or those of their suppliers.
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Note about Internet Broadcasting To view audio and video over the Internet, encoded files can either be downloaded (copied onto the hard disc) by the viewer, in which case they have to wait until the whole file has come down and then they can play it as often as they like, or they can be streamed, which means watched as they are transmitted but no local copy is stored [3]. Streaming provides practically immediate access - you see it as soon as you've clicked on it but you don't usually get to keep a copy. The quality is also restricted by your connection speed (inherently, you can't receive more data than you've got the connection for). Downloading means you have to wait but you get to keep the file and since you're not trying to watch it as it comes down, it can be encoded at a higher rate than your connection speed thus giving better quality. To confuse matters, there's also a half-way house known as "progressive downloading" whereby the file is copied to your hard disc but will start playing back as soon as enough has come down for the rest to have been downloaded by the time you get to the end. |
Culturejam specialises in making Internet video look great. We know that video and audio are the most compelling forms of communication available and that the Web is the most ubiquitous and interactive medium known to man. However, we also see that there is little synergy between them at present, largely due to a lack of expertise in Web-oriented video origination, digitisation, post-production and encoding. Having assembled a unique team bearing considerable skills in those areas, Culturejam is therefore positioned as the premier creator of Web-ready audio and video for all markets such as archiving, marketing and training.
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David Johns
Culturejam limited
One Minster Gardens
West Molesey
Surrey KT8 2ER
Email: djohns@Culturejam.tv
<http://www.Culturejam.tv/>
Phone: +44 (0) 20 8979 7600
Fax: +44 (0) 20 8979 8140
David Johns has worked in radio, television and computing, in both technical and creative arenas. His IT skills were honed at IBM and Logica; his media experience stems from working for broadcasters such as Virgin Radio, the BBC and local commercial radio. A regular user of the Internet since 1987, he witnessed the birth of Web radio and TV and thereafter focused his career onto this arena.
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For citation purposes:
Johns, D. "An Introductory Guide to Audio and Video Encoding ", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/jam/>
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By Christian Guetl - October 2001
Christian Guetl discusses a proposal for improvements to get to a more structured and personalized World Wide Web. The aim of this article is to discuss a vision, an idea of a possible way of providing existing Web content with more structure and context, which may help users to get more relevant information from the Internet as well as automated software to collect and process task specific information.
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The strength of Integrated Framework for Augmentation and Enrichment of Knowledge (IFAEK) allows, unlike recent systems, the combination of additional information from more than one meta-service within the content of a particular Web document. Therefore individual meta-information from several sources related to users needs and their user profile can be provided. This will support and improve users identifying, browsing, managing and evaluating Web content, and therefore build a smarter Web. Furthermore, some advanced, improved and novel services, even commercial services, are made possible by IFAEK.
IFAEK may handle current and future client applications (e.g. PC, PDA, WAP phones, set-top boxes and hands-free browsing systems) and information services to build a more powerful net of information sources on the Web by the use of combination and integration of distributed information systems.
Since early days of the Internet, many have made comments about the problem of unstructured and passive information. To overcome this situation, consequently numberless ideas and research work has be done. For example, the Xanadu Project led by Ted Nelson, an early hypertext pioneer, has always worked hard on the ideas of a stable, structured and interactive system since the 1960s [25], also Herman Maurer and the Hyper-G team in late 1980s [23]. To give examples of some more recent ideas, Tim Bernes-Lee proposes the idea of an improved "Semantic Web" [4], XML workgroups of the W3C [28] are on the way to making the semantic Web a reality. However, at the time of writing this article, users still face a lot of problems. Some of them are itemised below:
C. Chislenko explained the current situation accurately: "The Web is probably the richest information repository in human history, but most of its information is passive and unstructured. The Web doesn't know what it carries and for what purpose, and the users cannot specify what they want from it." [6]
We believe that today techniques and pre-existing information services on the Web may already provide a first solution for a more structured and personalized Web. In the remainder of this article we will discuss the basic ideas behind this, argue why our vision could become reality, describe the framework IFAEK and show improved features and novel services.
Since late-1997, the author of this article has been considering the serious problems stated in the above Section, which resulted in a number of former research works ([9], [19] and [32]). Frequent observations of research works, standardization efforts as well as public and commercial services in a broad field of Internet information systems, related to this serious problem, show some isolated islands of improvements. This then prompts the author of this article to propose a novel Integrated Framework for Augmentation and Enrichment of Knowledge (IFAEK) to the existing document structure by collaborative and distributed work of individuals and communities.
The idea is as obvious as it is simple. On the one hand, there is an unstructured and huge information repository on the Internet. On the other hand, there are a lot of useful but isolated services there. Why not to use pre-existing information services and therefore exploit a great mass of human knowledge stored on the Internet? Why not to let pre-existing results of computer processes taken into account? Why not to use the knowledge of the huge amount of users and exploit their behavior? Why not combine all of them and therefore provide users with more relevant information? Why not to allow commercial services to be a part of it and enable new commercial services? The answer is a simple to use a smart framework (see below) combining information services and providing composite information in a quite personalized way for users. The valuable and novel point is that information from more than one meta-service dependent on users' needs can be managed and provided in combination with the corresponding content to a wide range of clients. In addition, active information contributions as well as the behaviors of users also have to be taken into account.
That simple solution, stated above, led us to emphasize some important requirements for such a smart framework:
(1) Users (other than the author) and groups of users must be able to create and manage their own sets of metadata and structures for their specific purposes.
(2) This implicitly requires that metadata must be manageable in a distributed environment (independent of the related document).
(3) Different sets of Quality metadata - dependent on the special needs - must be provided for the users.
(4) Existing geographical distributed metadata (services) must be easy detectable and selectable by the users. Both requirements are only partially fulfilled at the time of writing.
(5) A variety of pre-existing and new services have to be manageable to meet users needs. A proper framework has to provide mechanism to also integrate commercial services. That means that a kind of micro payment has been taken into account.
IFAEK may be one possible way to provide a generic solution. It enables the integration and collaboration of pre-existing and future information services (combining isolated solutions) by an open framework. Bearing in mind these ideas, the author of this paper has observed research work, standardization efforts as well as public and commercial services in a broad range of Internet information systems. These observations lead to some reasons why the IFAEK may be possible, which will be discussed in the following Section.
For example, existing standards and auspicious drafts from the XML family of technologies for structuring content on the Web [28] and SOAP, a protocol for exchange of information in a decentralized, distributed environment [29] are available. RDF, the Resource Description Framework provides Web-based metadata activities including sitemaps, content ratings, stream channel definitions, search engine data collections (Web crawling), digital library collections, and distributed authoring [30]. Another interesting item is the topic map subject [27]. On the other hand, interesting middle ware standards allow applications compiling distributed services by using ".net" [12], "Sun One" [26] and "mono::" [24].
For example XML tools [28], SOAP protocol implementation [10], JavaTM Remote Method Invocation (RMI) [20], ".net" [12], "Sun One" [26] as well as "mono::" [24] and topic map tools [27] may support the idea of IFAEK.
Within the last years, the information technology (IT) revolution has caused favorable trends in network and hardware techniques, which can perfectly support the proposed framework. Faster network links and connections as well as flat rate offers, internet-capable handheld phones and Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) facilitate nearly permanent access to Web content. The situation may positively influence the knowledge sharing process, the enrichment of information and meta-knowledge. Consequently, users are increasingly going to use meta-services to pinpoint relevant information as well as passively enrich information by their behaviors and by actively contributing their own knowledge.
A large and increasing number of users, belonging to manifold social groups, interests and being located in virtually every country of the world, produces and uses the content on the Web. [16] [33] The critical mass of users required to build a global collective knowledge base, which can be managed by self-organized meta-services seems to have been reached.
One example of a general metadata service is described in the research work of Gronbaek et al. The authors discussed an approach to utilize open hypermedia structures (e.g. links, annotations, etc.) as metadata. They proposed a general open hypermedia system, which can manage the metadata for arbitrary Web sites and allows collaborative work. The authors introduced an XML-based data format, the Open Hypermedia Interchange Format (OHIF), for the handling of such structures. [17] Further services like subject gateways, annotated links lists, etc. are discussed in [31].
Examples in the field of distributed metadata application are [22], [15] and [18]. An example of a pre-existing commercial service is Alexa [2].
On one hand, the huge amount of information available on the Internet cannot be processed and managed by human efforts. On the other hand, only automated computer processes - recent techniques are mainly statistic-based processes - do not meet the requirements for processing and managing mankind's knowledge repository on the Internet. Dramatical improvements can be gained by combining the intelligence and creativity of humans with the power of computers [1], [5], [6], [7].
It is well known in social science and business economics that people aspire to tribute within their social environment, their business and informal communities. In the Internet environment, it may be that people work on open source projects or run a homepage providing interesting information. Mark Frauenfelder discusses this effect in his article in the WIRED magazine [14]. The author stated the effect that people in Internet communities work just for "ego gratification". For example, they answer questions for other Internet users [3], or rate Internet pages for a community [11]. Frauenfelder notes the "egoboo" effect (short for ego boost effect), which is described by "the rush you get when you see your name in print [...]". Exactly these effects can be and already are exploited by services and start-ups on the Internet. Further examples are well discussed in [14].
Such a proposed framework for meta-services enables new possibilities to establish further non-commercial and commercial services. This situation may help to push the idea to become reality.
An overview of the proposed framework is shown in Figure 1. On the lower-left side, the unstructured content of the Web provided by content services (CS) is symbolized. Only browsing by following links and using local features provided by these services (e.g. site map, local search functionality, etc.) are possible at this level of the model. This reflects the current situation of the Web.
The next level describes the meta-services (MS), which may provide additional information of CS for users or applications. Examples of existing MS are robot-based search engines, search catalogs, discussion and annotation services for foreign content, rating-level servers, etc. It is quite obvious that the proposed classification is going to become blurred with daily usage, because one and the same service (or even content) can represent its own entities of information as well as meta-information related to other content.
As already discussed above, MS are mostly isolated. That means, users can hardly find proper (task specific) meta-information related to documents they are browsing. To counteract these shortcomings, the meta-meta-services (MMS), shown in the upper-left, are proposed and introduced. On the one hand, the task of this layer is to know about existing MS and their profiles (type of service, objectives, topics or geographical areas which are covered, target audience, etc.). On the other hand, MMS has to provide the proper information for the integration layer (see paragraph below). Therefore, MMS will provide substantial information and will enable co-operation and information interchange, which are not available at the time of writing. It is worth mentioning that MMS are also going to become blurred into other services. However, for an easy understanding this classification seems to be useful.
The integration layer (IL) manages the proper information requests as well as the processing, combination and visualization of the information from CS, MS and MMS. Furthermore, the IL also has to consider user individual needs in respect to their user profiles and the respective content.
Figure 1 also shows different clients on the right. A future-oriented framework has to include and manage a wide range of existing front-end applications, like common PCs, Laptops, PDAs, handheld phones, set-top boxes, Web terminals, voice browsers, etc. It appears to be obvious that the variety of front-ends stated so far requires and enables different technical solutions for the integration layer: front-end integration (e.g. browser plug-in, applet, using XUL, etc.), client-side proxy solution, server-side proxy solution and server application integration (e.g. server side includes, etc.). For meeting the nature of the Internet, consequently the IL has to be designed in a distributed manner.
As shown in Figure 1, communication between at least MS and MMS, between MMS themselves, between CS, MS, MMS and IL as well as between IL and front-end applications is required within the framework. Improvements can also be achieved if communication is possible between MS themselves as well as between MS and CS. For example, MS can inform each other that new or changed meta-information is available. The proposal for the communication layer is a multiple solution using sockets, socks and HTTP.
 |
| Figure 1: Overview of the proposed Framework |
Figure 1: Overview of the proposed Framework. The schematic graphic shows islands of unstructured content, existing and possible meta-services (e.g. annotations systems, external metadata server, etc.) as well as meta-meta-services (a kind of Yellow Pages service for meta-services, accounting services, user profiling and management services, etc.). The integration layer handles the interaction between users, as well as providing an integrated view of the Web content, information of meta-services and meta-meta-services. It enables the combination of content information and information from several meta services related to the users' needs.
The author of this article would like to emphasize that the valuable and novel point is that information from more than one MS can be managed and provided in combination with the corresponding content. The pre-selection of services related to topics and tasks by users are also taken into account. The combination of several MS as well as MMS can provide synergetic effects, which may empower users to select, navigate, manage and evaluate content on the Web.
The aim of this section is to discuss some imaginable improvements for pre-existing services and to give examples of novel services based on the possibilities provided by IFAEK.
Distributed metadata services could counteract the timid usage of metadata within document structures, which seems to be particularly useful for pre-existing content. It is conceivable that such services include human generated additional information, like a classification scheme, keywords, description, related information, author information, etc. Furthermore, automated or semi-automated systems can track content services and generate statistical information about creation time, modification time, modification history, link information to former and more recent documents, information about embedded object (e.g. graphics, sound files, etc.) and hyperlinks. The ideas discussed in this paragraph , for example, can be used to provide additional information to corresponding Web content rendered within or besides the content, enrich link information and can be combined with other meta-services. The later idea enables also a feature, which may enrich search results with additional information.
Existing services like subject catalogs, annotated link lists, quality-proved subject gateways, etc. can also be seen as special kinds of metadata. Consequently, they can be used for an enrichment of the content provided, may help users follow links of particular interest and can be used to classify the content. Useful information for similar documents can also be provided by these services. Based on the ideas of the services stated so far, a novel quality metadata service can be provided. The aim of this service is to help users get more relevant and quality information they are looking for. It is proposed to take into account descriptive metadata (e.g. information about the author, publisher, description, classification, etc) and evaluative metadata (e.g. diction of the language, target audience, etc.). The proposed service should be suited to the management of an entire Web server, areas of Web servers, single objects, and even parts of documents, whereby existing metadata of refined granularity overrides more general metadata. The provision of metadata should be a multi-step process. On the first level, authors are allowed to refer quality metadata to Web content. On the second level, librarians and subject domain experts check, edit, enrich and rate existing quality metadata records or enter new records of their own. Quality metadata can enrich corresponding content in the visualization process or allow the combination of a search request with quality metadata. Furthermore, authors related to the corresponding topics and to the target audience can be rated either by experts or by information extracted by content ratings.
Another interesting field of services can be offered by distributed annotations and discussion threads related to content, which also represent a special kind of metadata. The possibility of annotations and discussions of foreign documents provide a very democratic feature. Apart from that, such services can also provide descriptions and hyperlinks to foreign content. Therefore, for example, they may be used to build guided tours for particular communities. Of course, this basic feature is not novel, but the new aspect is that information from more than one service can be rendered related to specific tasks and proper demand. An interesting feature may also allow the definition of an information entity of foreign content, and follow changes or provide the history of the chunk of information. For example, a four year old research paper gives statistical information about the sea temperature, the meta-service provides timeliness data and the trend of the past few years. Another service can supply the users with related news information based on the topic of a document or even related to the context of an information entity. Users are able to select one or more services and define their particular needs. For example, a user wants to get annotations from the academic community related to computer science, but also likes to be informed in the field of e-commerce business by annotations from the CNN community at the same time.
A further interesting field of services are shared bookmark services. The idea of sharing bookmarks is not novel, but the combination of such services with metadata services may support users to manage their personal views of the Internet. On the other hand, users can classify their own bookmarks. These human efforts may be exploited to create a collective taxonomy. Furthermore, the shared bookmarks can be used by other services to provide similar documents.
It appears obvious that many combinations of the services discussed within this Chapter are conceivable. Numerous further services and combinations of such services are possible. It seems to be obvious that also computer processes of intelligent agents may exploit the provision of additional information by IFAEK.
On the one hand, a wide range of shortcomings can be identified in the broad field of retrieving and managing information on the Web. On the other hand, a lot of isolated research work and pre-existing non-commercial and commercial services providing additional information can be detected. This led the author of this article to propose IFAEK, a framework of meta-services and meta-meta-services, which allows the improvement of existing services and to build novel services. The key features are that users are enabled to define particular meta-services related to different subjects. Meta-meta-services manage the information interchange between meta-services and help users to define their favored meta-services. IFAEK enables the provision of additional information from more than one meta-service. Information may be provided within or besides the original documents as well as within the search process.
The aim of the framework is to reach a more structured and personalized Web. Some improved and new ideas are discussed. We have shown that the objectives of a smarter Web can be reached by means of a smart framework like IFAEK.
The most important step for future work is to reach the critical mass of research institutes, application developers and existing service providers. Together an open standard has to be defined and a proper mirco payment system for commercial services has to be established. The Web must be enriched with more structure and meta-knowledge to support users and automated programs. We have to make the Web smarter. The proposed system IFAEK could be a solution to help us reach the dream of a more structured, interactive and personalized Web, and may enable novel non-commercial and commercial services.
First of all, many thanks to Prof. Herman Maurer (IICM) and Prof. Frank Kappe (Hyperwave R&D), who have contributed many interesting aspects and a lot of useful hints. Also I would like to thank the members of the WAG-IICM for some valuable discussions. Many thanks also to Infodelio Information Systems and Guetl IT Research and Consulting for supporting this paper. Last but not least, many thanks to Mrs. Muml, Mr. Bukowski, Mr. Baer and Mr. Zweiigel for their remarkable support.
This article may be dedicated in memoriam to Mr. Franz Hesse, who had strongly influenced important parts of my life and my schooling.
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Christian Guetl
Project Manager
Web Application Group, IICM
Graz University of Technology
Austria
CEO Infodelio Information Systems
Graz, Austria
Head of Guetl IT Research & Consulting
Graz, Austria
cguetl@acm.org
http://www2.iicm.edu/cguetl/
Phone: +43 316 876 5639
Fax: +43 316 876 5699
Christian Guetl is employed as a Project Manager at WAG-IICM
(Web
application group at IICM, Graz University of Technology). His
responsibilities include technical and organizational project
management in the field of information systems, establishing
internal project management and supervising of student's works.
He was co-initiator of the open source project xFIND
and
has conducted the lecture "Knowledge Management" at Graz
University of Technology for several years. Besides that,
Christian Guetl is head of Guetl
IT Research & Consulting
and CEO of Infodelio
Information Systems
.
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For citation purposes:
Guetl, C. "IFAEK: A Vision of Improvements for a More Structured and Personalized World Wide Web", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/ifaek/>
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The content on this page is current at the time of publication (October 2001), but will become out of date. To reach a more recent issue of Cultivate Interactive use the 'Current Issue' link in the top green navigational bar.
ilMuseums is the
biggest source of information about Israeli museums and their
exhibitions to appear online and in print. The site Database
contains information on more than 180 museums in Israel in three
languages: Hebrew, English and Russian.
The site has been recommended by the Ministry of tourism, the Israeli Embassy, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, local authourities and by tourist agencies and guides as the leading project in the area of Israeli museums.
ilMuseums is special in that it allows museums to edit information about themselves, their exhibtions, etc. at real time on-line. This facility is completely free of charge. Museums that don’t have access to the Internet can also place their info, sending it by any possible way. The site allows searching by category and region and features different museums daily.
Further Information?: Visit the ilMuseums Web site
or contact Vlad
Wolfson
.
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Renardus is a collaborative project that
aims to improve academic users' access to a range of
existing Internet-based quality information services across
Europe. Renardus is currently
in its pilot phase. The fully-operational Renardus service
is due to be launched in June 2002. Potential end users'
opinions are needed for developing the pilot.
The Renardus target audience is academics, researchers, library and user support staff in higher education and other relevant organisations across Europe. You can evaluate the Renardus pilot yourself between 17 September and 15 November 2001 by exploring the pilot service and completing a Web-based questionnaire. Participation does not require any advance knowledge or experience of similar services. Normal computer skills and some experience in using the Internet is enough.
Further Information?: Further details and
evaluation questionnaires in English / French / Dutch / German /
Finnish are available from the evaluation page
.
An article on Renardus entitled
Renardus: follow the fox!
appeared in issue 1 of Cultivate interactive.
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A new discussion list for news editors, journalists and researchers working on education and technology in Europe has recently been set up. Members contribute rights-free articles to the list, so that fellow editors can re-publish them to promote their own publications.
Further Information?: See the list Web
site
or contact Alexa Joyce
.
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The Museum Domain Management Association (MuseDoma) announced that it will accept preliminary requests for name reservations in the new top-level domain (TLD) .museum from June 30. The .museum TLD, one of the first sponsored TLDs, was created to provide bona fide museums, their professional associations and individual members of the museum profession with a distinct and unified online identity.
Further Information?: See the MuseDoma FAQs
or the article by Cary Karp in the last issue of Cultivate
Interactive
.
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The PULMAN
Network of Excellence is now launched under the European
Commission’s research programme for a User-Friendly
Information Society (DG Information Society).
Europe's public libraries and cultural organisations have a vital role to play in the development of an e-Europe. The PULMAN Network will stimulate and promote sharing of policies and practices for the digital era, in public libraries and cultural organisations which operate at local and regional level.
Initial membership of the PULMAN Network includes representatives of 26 European countries (see list attached). The PULMAN approach is inclusive and participation will be extended, in the first instance by the establishment of wider groups of activists in each country.
The PULMAN Network will:
During the next few months, the following services will be progressively available at the site:
Further Information?: See the Pulman Web site
or contact Mary
Gianoli
.
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The Intellectual Property Rights Helpdesk pilot project ends on Friday 31st August 2001. Two articles on the project appeared in earlier issues of Cultivate Interactive: