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Cultivate Interactive Issue 6: Editorial

Welcome to the sixth issue of Cultivate Interactive!

With the recent launch of Cultivate-Rusisia we thought it would be appropriate to give this issue of Cultivate Interactive an Eastern European feel. We have two articles on the Cultivate-Russia launch, one by David Fuegi outlining the project and an ‘At the Event article’ by myself revealing how the Launch meeting went. There is also a piece on recent events and funding at the Russian State Library by Monika Segbert, an article on Chodovec, the recently opened archive building located in the centre of Prague and the facilities it will offer for Czech archives by Borivoj Indra and Vladimíra Hradecká and a piece on the ARCCHIP project which uses workshops as a way of exchanging knowledge between EU and CEE countries. Keeping with the Eastern European theme, see if you can identify this issue’s ‘Spot the City’ photographs!

Other feature articles in the magazine cover a wide variety of Digital Cultural Heritage projects; some funded by DIGICULT such as Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material (COLLATE), Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks (REGNET) and BioNet. And others, such as Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access (SEPIA), Children's Historical Literature Disseminated Throughout Europe (CHILDE), Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), Electronic Information for Librariesn (eIFL), New Access And Services For Cultural Content (Activate) funded by a variety of other funding schemes.

Covering a more general subject area John Perkins, the Executive Director of the CIMI Consortium, has written an article discussing the potential the much talked about Open Archives Initiative may hold for museums. He also talks about how CIMI have been testing the OAI protocol by creating a generic OAI-compliant repository, and how they hope to conduct a more formal, large-scale test of the OAI for museums by harvesting museum metadata. As John explains “the purpose of the research is to explore how a specific community of users can use the OAI protocol and to begin the process of assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of OAI.”

In the regular columns section we have the usual DIGICULT column, plus an extra column on DIGICULT's trial action Projects and their accompanying measure TRIS. There will be more news on the new projects in forthcoming issues of Cultivate Interactive. We unfortunately have no National Node column this issue but have a really interesting Praxis article in compensation. Paul Lewis and his colleagues from the University of Southampton discuss retrieval and navigation as ways of accessing multimedia information. In the past metadata has been used to retrieve multimedia data from multimedia information bases. Recent research has tried to address some of the limitations of using text metadata by making use of multimedia content as a basis for retrieval. The article asks whether content-based techniques are really making a useful contribution or whether we should restrict ourselves to the use of metadata. In the metadata column Frans Smit provides us with an English and Dutch version of his report on how we can adapt concepts from Information and Knowledge Management (IKM) and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and create data Warehouses in which to organize and give access to metadata about historical archives and collections.

Finally we also have one extra Miscellaneous article by Michelle Fiander, Manager of the Web Reference Center, Maryland, America. Michelle has written a letter to us over here in Europe explaining what Virtual Reference is and how it came about.

It is also time for a farewell. I have been the editor of Cultivate Interactive since its launch in July 2000 but am now moving on to pastures new. I am staying at UKOLN but have recently been appointed as the QA Focus/NOF-digitise Advisor. Most of my work will revolve around advising and supporting projects within the DNER and NOF-digi programmes for Higher Education, Further Education and life long learning, here in the UK. Cultivate Interactive will continue to be published by new blood. So farewell, and thanks to all the readers and writers whom I have got to know so well over the last year and a half. Also a huge thanks to Shirley Keane who has helped me pull together this issue in a very limited amount of time. Without Shirley this issue would still be a collection of word files and scribbles in my note book!

Marieke Napier (Editor)

Date of Page: 11 February 2002

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