Search Options | Help | Site Map | Cultivate Web Site
		Search Disabled

Activate: New Access And Services For Cultural Content

By Annette Kelly and Caroline Clery - February 2002

Annette Kelly and Caroline Clery describe the work of the Activate project [1]. Activate, has two primary objectives: to establish a thematic network to local studies collections held in two Irish libraries; and, to provide a methodology and toolkit which will allow other cultural institutions to replicate the results of the project.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Introduction

Digital technologies are transforming the way in which cultural institutions are making their holdings accessible to a wider audience. The state of the art in collection management for many cultural heritage institutions is the storage of paper records and artefacts. This results in limitations for access and preservation. Digitisation processes and interactive virtual representations can benefit both the user and the collection manager through the possibility of global access, safeguarding fragile originals, overcoming geographical peripherally, and developing links to similar content in thematic networks. Activate aims to trial the technologies which will bring small local cultural collections into the greater information society, by enabling new access modes, new management and co-operation tools, new thematic networks and by establishing a business case for both providing and using such tools and methodologies.

The Project

ACTIVATE is an EU funded Irish national project which began on July 10th 2001 and will run for one year. The project is funded under the IST Programme accompanying measures specific to technology take-up measures Key Action 3 “Heritage for All” initiative.

The project is testing the use of new technology to open up new ways of accessing cultural content and records on the Internet.

There are 5 Irish partners cooperating in the ACTIVATE consortium:

• An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council
• Digital Media Centre, Dublin Institute of Technology
• Silverstorm Ltd.
• Clare County Library
• Cork City Library

The Library Council is the coordinator of the project and is also the national coordinating body for libraries. The Digital Media Centre and Silverstorm Ltd. are the technical partners or the “technology providers”, The Digital Media Centre is a university department and Silverstorm Ltd. is a SME. The two local library services are “technology users”. Thus, the consortium can be defined as consisting of technology providers and technology users, the aim of the project being to produce a toolkit and methodology from which it is easy for the non technologists to gain benefit.

Existing content held in the two library services is being digitised, made available on the web and a thematic network is being developed as a research model. The two libraries and the technology partners work closely together to develop the ultimate result of the project: the ACTIVATE template which can be adapted and adopted by others to use.

The two local authority library services that are taking part in pilot- work to form an eventual template provide the project with useful and diverse examples of cultural content: Cork City is an urban library service which will focus on online local history documentation of the historical Shandon area of Cork. Clare County is a rural library service that is working to reveal and promote the landscape and history behind the now deserted Scattery Island, off the Clare coast.

Virtual access will be opened to conservation sites of cultural and historical importance. As part of the project, the Digital Media Centre will build a virtual reality model of an historical landscape (Scattery Island) to provide a new way of accessing existing rich stores of cultural content concerning the landscape.

Each step of the process is being documented and the appropriate templates and tools provided, to produce a ready-made, easy to use “out-of-the-box” solution for cultural providers such as museums, galleries, archives and libraries across Europe who are interested in replicating the project’s work. The template and documentation will be available for these institutions to download.

The project’s target audience is similar groups of cultural institutions in countries across Europe. The groups may have an interest or theme which they wish to exploit through the use of web technologies. The ACTIVATE template would be of use to them if they lack technical resources for maintaining such a network. In the short–term the project aims to expand its user base to other libraries in Ireland, but the nature of the ACTIVATE output is such that it will be useful in other countries and for organisations other than libraries.

Current Position

Activate is now at the midway point in the project. The first draft of the portal and content site templates are available from the Web site [1]. All partners are involved in the validation process which is designed to find and iron out problems with the sites and documentation produced to-date. The sites went live on 21 December 2001 and are being added to and amended on a weekly basis. The VRML content is being finalised and will be linked to sets of cultural information.

The project team are committed to developing a methodology and templates which will be user friendly for content providers and end users. Comment is very much welcomed and would be particularly useful now during the evaluation stage.

The Benefits of the ACTIVATE Project:

• The ACTIVATE template will benefit cultural providers such as museums and archives, the tourist industry, schools, or any small business or local project group who wishes to download the template that will be freely available on the Internet. Using the ACTIVATE template will be straightforward as we are creating a user-friendly package that will be accessible to users with low IT skills. Some technical expertise will be required for the initial implementation of the template but once set up the maintenance will be simple. Using the template should improve the user’s IT skills.
• Cultural providers who take advantage of the ACTIVATE tools and methodology will benefit. Treasures and fragile documents can be now, both accessed and preserved. Such special collections have to be stored carefully and often space, or conservation, restrictions mean that the items and papers cannot be viewed easily. By digitising and indexing the documentation and by providing advice on how to form links to photographic, map and tourism sites ACTIVATE will allow cultural providers to gain value from their collections, and provide improved service to a wider audience of both, professional researchers and the general public.
• Society benefits by the increase in freely-available cultural information on-line. Tourist visits can be planned, based on local content and landscapes publicised via ACTIVATE. Research into local history, genealogy and family history, parish records etc. will be brought into the focus of the new WWW information retrieval and management tools.
• Initial local content hosting by project partners (e.g. Clare Library) has been very popular, both with locals and with national and international tourists. This has a positive impact on tourism and employment especially for peripheral regions. Therefore the community hosting the cultural organisation also benefits.
• The availability of IT hardware, software and skills in the local library also means that disadvantaged members of the community, or those without home or school ICT access, can be exposed to the new technologies.
• Cooperation is encouraged between organisations who wish to form a thematic network together.

References

1. Activate Site
   URL: <http://www.activate.ie/>

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Author Details

Annette Kelly

An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council,
53 & 54 Upper Mount St.
Dublin 2.

akelly@librarycouncil.ie

Phone:00353-1-6761167
Fax: 00353-1-6766721

Caroline Clery

An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council,
53 & 54 Upper Mount St.
Dublin 2.

Phone:00353-1-6761167
Fax: 00353-1-6766721

cclery@librarycouncil.ie

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

For citation purposes:
Kelly, A. and Clery, C. "Activate: New Access And Services For Cultural Content", Cultivate Interactive, issue 6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/activate/>

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Related articles:
If you would like to view similar articles to this one click on a key word below:

< - libraries - culture - >

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Copyright ©2000 - 2001 Cultivate. | Published by UKOLN | Design by ILRT | Contact Us