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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)
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By David Fuegi - February 2002
CULTIVATE-Russia is a new addition to the Cultivate Cultural Heritage Applications Network (CULTIVATE) which supports the cooperation of memory institutions (archives, libraries and museums) under the European Commission's Information Society Technologies Programme (IST). It brings Russia into the network and completes the network in its present form. CULTIVATE-Russia starts in January 2002 and runs for 18 months. More information will be available shortly from the Cultivate Web site [1].
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From 1st January 2002 the Cultivate family of projects will be
completed as CULTIVATE-Russia comes on stream funded by DGINFOS.
The project's kick-off meeting will be held in Moscow in
mid-January [2] and the Russian partners plan to get up to speed
rapidly. The project will run for 18 months so that it ends
around the same time as the rest of the Cultivate network, which
includes Cultivate EU and Cultivate CEE. Although it is formally
a separate project with its own contract, budget and partners it
will aim to work very closely with the other Cultivates. It will
join their joint management meetings and workshops including
those planned for Barcelona in May, contribute to Cultivate
Interactive and to the policy monitoring and awareness raising
activities of the network. But primarily it will expend its
energies in Russia because Russia is very big and Russia is a bit
different.
CULTIVATE-Russia will contribute to the overall strategic need to link Russia to Europe by building important human networks and helping to integrate the Russian cultural heritage network into the European network. Russia has a great wealth of cultural heritage and ICT expertise, which is still mostly inaccessible to EU citizens. CULTIVATE-Russia will play its part in ensuring that the European Commission has reliable information on trends and developments in the archives, libraries and museums in Russia, an informed international human network of participants in the IST Programme and informed political support for the Programme.
In Russia, with its enormous territory and low income population, it is impossible to hope that multimedia computers and access to Internet will be found in each family in the near future. This is why any broad access of the population to electronic resources, and the overcoming of the "digital divide" is first and foremost connected with public places of access in libraries, museums, and information centres. Libraries, museums and archives in Russia are entering the electronic age. Practically all the regional libraries, as well as a majority of city libraries in Russia have electronic reading rooms or are going to organise such rooms in the near future. Central libraries of the country, including the Russian State Library, the Science and Technology Library, the Library of Foreign Literature and other libraries of large cities have Internet connections.
A Russian node to represent the IST Programme to the cultural heritage domain has not previously existed and this will be remedied through CULTIVATE-Russia , which will aim to create a cadre of influential staff who are knowledgeable about the programme and keen to build on its outcomes. Language, distance and a comparatively poor IT and telecommunications infrastructure mean that achieving these objectives in Russia will be challenging. CULTIVATE-Russia expects to have to make a good deal of material available in Russian (including a Russian equivalent of Cultivate Interactive) and to use paper-based communication on a larger scale than in other countries. Because of the country's vast size, events will need to take place in major regional centres and not only in the capital.
CULTIVATE-Russia has 7 partners. The British Council (Moscow) is the principal contractor and responsible for the administrative/financial co-ordination function. The Council has enormous experience of running projects in Russia and will support the project in many ways, making full use of its extensive network of regional contacts and offices. The five Russian partners, representing the 3 main cultural heritage domains, have leadership positions and a wide geographical spread within Russia, which is, of course, a huge country. David Fuegi of MDR Partners, which is responsible for the management of CULTIVATE-CEE will also manage CULTIVATE-Russia. This will ensure continuity and close liaison between the projects. Monika Segbert will work closely with MDR and the principal Russian partners on key issues including publicity. To help achieve close personal and professional liaison within the Cultivate group of projects, many of the technical partners in Cultivate CEE and Cultivate EU will lead workshops in Moscow linked to the kick-off of Cultivate Russia.
The Russian partners are the Russian Cultural Heritage Network, Department for Archives of Khabarovsk Regional Administration, Chelyabinsk Regional Universal Library, Smolensk State Union of Museums and Centre PIC. Three of the Russian partners represent major players in the three main sectors represented within the cultural heritage domain - libraries, museums and archives. The fourth (Russian Cultural Heritage Network) is a cross-sectoral body based in the beautiful Darwin Museum in Mosocw. Centre PIC, which is also Moscow based has extensive experience in managing the prestigious EVA conference and will organise a major conference in Russia as parto f the CULTIVATE-Russia activity.
The Russian Cultural Heritage Network [3] [4] works closely with a wide range of cultural heritage institutions across Russia and brings together many regional and international partners. RCHN has substantial experience of information collection and dissemination and has built up large web-sites for the cultural heritage domains. Based in modern offices in the Darwin Museum, the Network has staff with high levels of technical and managerial expertise. Amongst the websites created by RCHN are All-Russian Museums Registration, Russian Museums and Galleries Online, Russian State Library, Russian Culture and Zoos of Russia.
The Department for Archives of Khabarovsk Regional Administration is an independent institution that is engaged in the process of archive administration under the statute of Khabarovsk region "Archive's stock, archives and the practices Act". Chelyabinsk Regional Universal Library is one of the oldest libraries in the Urals region founded in 1898. Nowadays the library is involved in many different activities and as a result it has significant human networks. The library ranks as one of the large regional libraries of Russia with about 2 million stock items and plays an important role in the cultural life of the Chelyabinsk region where it functions as the regional depository and methodology research centre for all libraries in the area. Smolensk State Union of Museums is one of the largest unions of museums in the Russian Federation and is involved in a wide range of activities including seminars and workshops on art and culture issues and has strong connections with museums and their associations and regional authorities and has been heavily involved with IT applications since 1994. Centre PIC - the Centre for Informatisation in the cultural sphere of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation - was established in 1992. Its primary objective is to investigate new information technologies and to apply them in the cultural area.
Centre PIC is a state research and design body subordinate to the Ministry of Culture and works under contracts with this Ministry, with the Ministry of Science and Technological Policy, and with Russian museums and other cultural institutions. In 1995 the Ministry of Culture of Russia set up the Centre of Multimedia Technologies (as a subsidiary of Centre PIC) to co-ordinate the efforts of different bodies connected with multimedia publishing and distribution in culture and art. The Centre's services include evaluation of proposed projects and works-in-process. In addition, the Centre prepares drafts for laws in the area of rights and ownership of cultural properties. Centre PIC monitors and analyses new information and communication technologies in culture and art and presents annual reports on the topic. In 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001Centre PIC organised EVA Moscow, a leading international event in Russia and Eastern Europe on new information technologies in the cultural area.
It is intended that more details about the project will appear shortly on the Cultivate Web site.
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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. "Russia Joins the Cultivate Family", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/russia/>
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By Silke Grossmann, Vic Haesaerts, Gerda Koch and Walter Koch - February 2002
Silke Grossmann, Vic Haesaerts, Gerda Koch and Walter Koch report on the Regnet Project which aims to set up a functional network of service centres in Europe, providing IT-services dedicated to Cultural Heritage organisations.
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The concept of a European Digital Library cannot only be based on a technical framework enabling access to digital goods – there is also a need to introduce new ways of cooperation between different stakeholders (Cultural Organisations, Industries, Administrations, etc.) as well as to “re-engineer” traditional business processes in the light of globalisation and world wide markets. The main activities within a support environment for I(nternet) Markets comprise of Content Engineering, Platform Engineering, and Enterprise Engineering.
The REGNET - Cultural Heritage in REGional NETworks project - targets all of above the three areas. The project was introduced under the Action Line ‘Access to digital collections of cultural and scientific content’ of the European Union IST-Information Society Technologies Programme and 23 partners, cultural organisations (museums, libraries and archives) and IT-industry representatives, from 10 European Union states as well as Bulgaria and Russia are participating. REGNET aims to set up a functional network of service centres in Europe, which provide IT-services dedicated to Cultural Heritage organisations and will be an enabler of e-Business activities for CH organizations. REGNET is a research and development project with a demonstration phase. It started April 1st 2001 and will last for two years. The whole project budget is above 5 Mio. EUR and 48,5% funded by the European Union. The Project Coordinator is AIT Applied Information Technique Research Ltd [1].
REGNET will set up a functional network of cultural service centres through Europe, which will provide IT-services dedicated to cultural heritage organisations. A technical and legal framework, the REGNET system, for such a service infrastructure will be developed. This will offer services like data entry, search and retrieval, and e-Business. It will be based mainly on integration work using state-of-the-art components. The network will integrate multi-media industries, content providers and service centre operators. Existing cultural infrastructures will be exploited and new infrastructures should be developed where necessary.
The technical infrastructure will allow the setting up of low cost service centres. The membership concept of the service centres will generate a critical mass of digital or physical goods contained in Content Provider's organisations.
The four players within the network are the content providers, the service centre operators, the system developers and end users. The content providers (museums, libraries, archives etc.) will provide access (via wired and wireless communication) to their digital contents, services and products and offer them to their clients (B2C). In return they can use the REGNET facilities for multimedia productions and database management, or cooperate with other REGNET partners during the creation of databases, generation of multimedia products or creation of a virtual exhibition (B2B). The service centre operators will generate income by providing the technical infrastructure (software/hardware) to content providers and other partners within the REGNET network. They offer additional IT-services and consultancies. And the system developers are selling the REGNET system to other cultural service centres and content providers. They implement additional components for the REGNET software system (additional ‘nodes’ like an ‘exhibition creator’, etc), and will generate income via licence fees for the REGNET system. For the end user the system will offer easy and wide access to cultural heritage (CH) data information and the purchase of CH related goods and services at one point, with stress on the production of personalized goods (e.g. CD-ROM) and services.
REGNET will also provide a unique facility for metadata definitions for both CH-related data and e-business related data via the search entry in the REGNET – Portal and the REGNET - Ontology subsystem. Here not only metadata related to objects is addressed, but also definitions of work flows, business processes, etc. are included which lead to the concept of Ontology within the Cultural Heritage domain. Within the project a data entry facility using Web-browsers and adaptable to different needs within different domains (Museums, Library, Archives) will be established. This facility will support existing standards (ICOM/CIDOC, UNIMARC, ISAD(G), etc) and is configurable by the REGNET System user. At the e-Business level REGNET provides the generation of a customised shopping cart systems within the business to consumer (B2C) framework.
REGNET will also examine how next generation mobile networks can be exploited to widen the potentiality of Web services in the field of Cultural Heritage. Appropriate gateway functions and interworking units will be envisaged to interface the REGNET architecture with the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Systems) structure and ensure a seamless provisioning of REGNET services to mobile customers.
Already existing electronic catalogues (OPACS: Online Public Access Catalogues) referring to cultural and scientific objects contained in libraries, museums, archives, and galleries, as well as to goods and services will be used. Where there are no catalogues yet new catalogues will be developed in order to establish a 'virtual union' catalogue of all OPACS and product/service catalogues held locally.
In addition the work includes the outlining of necessary 'supply chains' and the connected business processes and functions to deliver digital and physical goods. ADevelopment ll the business transactions on the B2B and B2C level (containing payment features, copyright systems, authentication control, etc) will be guided by a legal framework that will be worked out accordingly. The reorganisation of existing processes and introduction of computerised functions which make transactions for low money goods worth while (e.g. small copyright fees for digital images) is an essential part of the project.
The building blocks which constitute the REGNET-System are supporting access to cultural and scientific information as well as to product and service information offered by different organizations. The building blocks are outlined in the figure below. The REGNET-Portal enables entry of remote data, distributed search and e-business functions. The Cultural Heritage Data Management allows the search in distributed metadata repositories connected to data of cultural heritage content. The e-Business Data Management gives access to distributed goods and services catalogues via an e-business system. And the Ontology Checker contains specifications of metadata, terminologies etc. which are used in the e-business and cultural heritage field. Finally the Electronic Publisher allows the production of personalized digital products based on standardized metadata and work flows.
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REGNET extends the traditional access facilities to distributed heterogeneous catalogues by integration of product and service catalogues managed by e-business systems. Because of the large REGNET consortium real world tests covering 6 European regions (a dozen states) are possible.
The project will observe and take into account the ongoing and recent work of CEN/ISSS (Electronic Commerce Workshop) but will also look into recent activities like RosettaNet, eCo-Framework, OBI, etc.
REGNET will evaluate a networked organisation model (comparable to the Art Museums Image Consortium/AMICO in the United States) and the integration possibilities of tools and systems for co-operative working.
Within the REGNET system there are three building blocks which can be considered as vertical functions:
1) Content creation and management is based on actual standards efforts in the field of the different organisations involved. The inclusion of so called 'Dublin Core' metadata is as well an actual topic as the Z39.50/XML-related standardisation work is, which is targeted to a harmonised search and retrieval facility across different domains. REGNET may influence the development of a so called Z39.50/XML-application profile: the Bath-Profile. This technique, to make Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs) interoperable, is essential to REGNET, since by this way the catalogue of the REGNET shopping system is generated dynamically according to the request of a user.
2) The platform management is based on up-to-date Internet technology and is the basis for the middle ware being the agent between content and service supplier and the requester (user). It is expected that during the implementation of REGNET the first large trials of systems following the OBI reference architecture will deliver results (RosettaNet).
3) The enterprise engineering will focus on some selected business processes and functional units: access to distributed catalogues, a shopping cart system, creation of a personalised catalogue based on retrieved data from the 'virtual catalogue' (in printed and electronic form), an Internet auction system (e.g. offering duplicates of posters), and a delivery system for physical goods (e.g. goods from museum stores).
On a 'horizontal' basis the XML/XSL-technology is used to structure data semantically and physically. This affects the creation of metadata, describing real (primary) objects (artefacts, naturefacts,...), media objects (photos, videos, ...) or bibliographic type objects (literature in the broadest sense). On the other hand all information within business transactions is wrapped within XML structures: Order, Invoice, Despatch, Report, ...). The recent developments in the field of XML/EDI standardisation will be used (ebXML). Another topic will be the definition of information products by appropriate document type definitions and style sheets. This should enable the 'non-media-professional' end user to easily generate catalogues or even CD-ROMs on demand. This might be the first step into the direction to create virtual exhibitions on demand by users themselves.
The scenarios outlined below can be considered as a first reference to e-Business processes only.
A tourist wants to buy articles related to the cultural heritage of a region; he/she is interested in physical goods from one or more museum shops as well as in specific surrogate (images) of cultural objects located in museums, archives, or libraries in the region. He/she can use a terminal at a tourist office where he/she searches the REGNET virtual catalogue for relevant images and information, browses for articles located in museum stores and places orders.
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A museum wants to produce a CDROM containing information about specific objects that he/she is interested in and which are related to a region.
The curator at the museum's side selects relevant information (text, images, films); he/she contacts a media producer, selects the basic layout/storyboard for the CDROM and works out together with the industrial partner - eventually with the help of other expert(s) - the final storyboard and the work flow necessary for the production process. He/she signs a contract for the production process and receives the master copy of the CDROM.
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The owner of a private collection wants to sell some of his/her assets on a maximum prize. He/She thinks about putting the offers on the Internet.
He/She digitises with the help of a REGNET-Partner (e.g. Cultural Service Centre/CSC) surrogates of the goods which will be sold. Additional information and expertises are gained after consultation of the Virtual Catalogue. An dedicated Internet Auction System is set up at an Cultural Service Centres (CSC) site and offers bidding to interested user communities. The marketing of this auction is supported by the CSC. This business case can be considered as combination of B2C and B2B functions and demonstrates that a stakeholder can obtain different roles in different business-cases.
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Electronic commerce, notably business to business e-commerce, is booming and world-wide e-commerce sales are expected to grow 40 times between 1998 and 2003 by which time they will become over 15% of all sales. The Internet and e-commerce are also leading to a surge in new company creation. The market for REGNET systems and services can to some extent be reckoned by the number of museums, libraries and archives in Europe. A rough estimation would deliver a potential number of 3.000 (15% of 20.000 museums) museum shops throughout Europe being candidates to be partner of the REGNET network!
“Content” is the basis for the planned REGNET portal and key success factor of the whole project. In order to make the system able to adapt to and compete on the market and to provide high quality digital assets and services the analysis of the available content at partner sites is - with regard to an effective content creation and content management - one of the main tasks in the project. The important decision to take consists in defining what objects or surrogates might attract potential users or could be a basis for follow up added value processing. The nature of data will not only be of cultural & scientific type; goods available in museum shops have to be documented too to provide Internet access to the museum shop. It might be useful not only store “primary” goods immediately for use of further processing, but also “eye catcher” suited to invoke a on demand process eventually doing a painting according to a theme offered in REGNET (“painting on demand”).
The analysis of collections and items located in libraries, museums, archives, research centres, etc. in a participating region was done by a multi-step approach (Figure 1).
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| Figure 1: Objectives of the audit concept of WP 1.1 |
The chosen methodology sought to describe not only the current practises (the status quo) at the side of the content providers in different domains but also to provide a guide on international best practise regarding the usage of the Internet for presentation of collections (search and browse), communication and interaction with potential users, e-Commerce-transactions etc. By examining and documenting the State-of-the-Art in the cultural sector an orientation on well established trends and methods should be assured and features be identified to be applied for the REGNET system. The overall goal was to derive and to define functional requirements for the REGNET system.
As part of the envisaged system the theme-based approach was developed - the idea and the aim behind was to deliver further added value in areas such as education, electronic publishing and virtual exhibitions. The themes should deliver supporting material in selling pieces of art or surrogates, offer new possibilities in the area of cultural tourism and realize innovative access methods to search for art objects (paints, sculptures, installations, net art, design, ceramics, jewellery etc.), museum objects, physical goods in the museum shops, photography and library collections (e. g. books, manuscripts and maps). The theme-based approach will be described in chapter xy ).
All participating content providers could provide normally more than one collection – the challenge was to select assets which fit to the envisaged clientele. Due to the fact that almost all content providers directly involved started digitisation activities but not finished them it was necessary to try to achieve some critical mass also by complementing the different offerings.
Once it is clarified what material is going into the REGNET repositories concrete guidelines based on best practice experiences have to be developed. The recommendations and guidelines to be worked out should be based on two basic principles: efficiency and cost effectiveness. Because collections differ widely in their types of material, audience, and institutional purpose, specific practices may vary from institution to institution as well as for different collections within a single institution. Therefore, the sets of recommendations must be broad enough to apply to most cases, and try to synthesize the differing recommendations previously made for specific target collections/audiences.
The "general" digitisation plan should serve as an guideline for all digitisation activities in the REGNET project. The general policy of digitisation in the project and selections with regard to content and technological issues are described. The digitisation plan lists all tasks (which can be tackled in sequence or in parallel) valid for digitisation projects in general. The "modules" of the general digitisation plan should allow to convert any individual collection according to the described procedures by considering the large number of variables, driven by the priorities, the institution, user needs, technical issues and available funding. It should help to consider all things needed to build up a digital collection: from the collection itself, the data that describes the objects and the user groups. Such a systematic planning should provide the basis for high quality content!
The thematic approach of cultural heritage information within REGNET is based on a cultural heritage data triangle. This triangle consists of “themes”, “thematic texts” and “collection object images & descriptions”(see figure REGNET – Cultural heritage data triangle).
Whereas collection objects images and descriptions pertain in most cases strictly to the objects themselves (see the equivalence with the standard collection management systems fundamentals), thematic texts are delivering supplementary and contextual information related to an object or to a set of objects. Moreover, these thematic texts are set up in a way that they can be reused for different contextual views and situations.
In contrast with collection objects and thematic texts, which contain real basic descriptive information about something, themes reflect the scope, resource locations and relationships of all this descriptive information. By their nature, themes are part of the Ontology function of the REGNET system. On a more practical side, a theme can be considered as a collection of thematic texts and/or objects that have one or more characteristics (“keywords”) in common. One can easily understand that with this approach the theme concept is quite flexible and that a single thematic text can show up in different contexts. Themes can either refer to thematic texts only, or to collection objects only or, in most cases, to both, thematic texts and collection objects. The term “fragment” reflects best the “building block”-functionality, vis-à-vis the themes, of those thematic texts and collection objects.
Applying this theme-fragment approach on a search into a collection databases, a user can gain access in an indirect way to the objects via themes and thematic texts in addition to the standard direct search through the same objects. The opposite, accessing information contained in themes and thematic texts through the objects’ databases, is also possible.
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| REGNET - Cultural heritage data triangle |
A theme, in the concept of REGNET, should not be defined as a predefined hierarchy of a set of thematic texts and collection objects with fixed relationships. The constituting parts of themes should be build up of data containing a set of keywords that reflect the main content, the main idea of it. Those parts can be (automatically or manually) grouped together into a theme by the keywords that accompany them. One can easily imagine that a text that has been written as part of a range of texts about measuring time can also show up as part of a theme about famous scientists. A contribution about a certain saint can show up in a theme about things or persons of which people believe that they will give protection.
However, in order to achieve quickly a coherent and consistent entity of related information, the production of texts and the digitising of objects has to be done following a certain top down approach (« » the keyword bottom up approach described higher). Hereby each content provider has to choose a central theme with a set of related themes, within which she/he can develop a substantial number of relevant thematic texts and related objects.
The data entry part of themes has many facets and varies from scanning and OCR, over on line Z39.50 connections, to specific fragment data entry and topic map generation. The use of themes in outputting something interferes with a lot of functions incorporated in the REGNET system as can be seen in the figure “Theme mapping to functionalities”. Themes, together with the thematic texts and the objects, can as well deliver constituting parts for Search & Retrieval and Publishing as offer supporting material for the e-Business part.
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| REGNET - Theme mapping to functionalities |
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Silke Grossmannn
Silke Grossmannn works for IMAC, Constance as a Project Manager / Consultant. She is the Project manager, responsible for the field of electronic markets, a Consultant in the field of information and knowledge management and offers Training: Themes: Information delivery in online services, Internet-Information systems, Intranets and in the use of new media. She is participating in the following projects: building of an online community in Switzerland (Arte 24), Consultation of museums on the application of new media, development of a software system for museums (Museums Access), creating a variety of projects in the area of Online-Services (information needs analyses, conception of information services and systems, evaluation of information services and systems). Realization of an empirical study in the field of regional and specialized electronic markets, conception and realization of different types of electronic markets (needs analysis, definition of a portfolio for an offer, creation of a business plan, project management in the realization and application of a marketing strategy). Participation in EU-Projects: NBE-BIS, ETTN, DeMes.
Prior to joining IMAC Silke worked at the University of Constance as a Lecturer in Information mediation and as a Scientific assistant to Prof. Rainer Kuhlen, Creating and updating Web sites about the online and information market. Before this she was a Librarian working in Information structure and classification, formal and technical cataloging
Vic Haesaerts
Vic Haesaerts has a degree in Electronic Engineering. He has considerable experience in the management of innovative projects in the telecommunications and banking sector. His research activities have mainly been focused on artificial intelligence techniques and electronic distribution channels. At the moment he is the managing director of Tarx and an expert-evaluator for European projects.
Walter Koch
kochw@ait.co.at
Professor Walter Koch received a PhD in Mathematics and Physics from University of Graz in 1970. He is shareholder and director for AIT Research Ltd. (Angewandte Informationstechnik Forschungsgesellschaft mbH.), and is an Associate Professor at the University of Graz and a Guest Professor at the University of Krems. Prof. Koch's relevant experience includes: heading different research institutes at JOANNEUM RESEARCH Ltd, working as a Consultant to different national and international organizations (eg UNESCO, DFG, EC, Austrian ministries, Graz municipality). He is a member of several international and international scientific associations (eg. ICOM, ÖGDI, ONORM, VÖB, UNESCO). Walter has a vast amount of project experience in bibliographic information, information systems, IT-management, EU Projects (TAP, Raphael, TenTelecom; IST), ESA, CIMI. He is the overall Project Co-ordinator and managert of the EU-project REGNET, Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks. He is also a personal consultant to the EU-Project DIGICULT. Walter has published more than 70 papers and technical reports, and presented papers in four continents at least at 100 conferences, seminars and workshops.
Gerda Koch
kochg@ait.co.at
Gerda Koch received a Master of Arts in English with a combination of studies in Economics and Law at the University of Graz, and also received an academic degree in a course of studies on Multimedia at the University of Graz. Gerda has been employed at AIT, Applied Information Technique Ltd since 1991. There she has worked on diverse informatics projects, for example a production automation system for a window-producing company, the database publishing production of the yearly published Austrian Statistics on Non-University Education. She also collaborated in the European Union TenTelecom project MOSAIC (Museums Over States And vIrtual Culture) for the Austrian partner of the project.
Since 1998 Gerda Koch has been managing director of AIT Ltd. She now focuses on cultural digital content provision whilst working on the national project MODOK (Modular Documentation System) for the Austrian Ministry of Science and Traffic and the EU-project COVAX (Contemporary Culture Virtual Archive in XML). Within the EU-project REGNET, Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks Gerda Koch is also responsible for co-ordination and project management.
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For citation purposes:
Grossman, S., Haesaerts, V., Koch, G., and Koch, W. "Cultural Heritage in Regional Networks: The REGNET Project", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/regnet/>
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By Gordon Clapworthy - February 2002
International projects, such as the investigation of the Human Genome, have demonstrated what can be achieved when an international academic community organises itself in a concerted set of activities. Gordon Clapworthy introduces BioNet a project which has taken its inspiration from such far-sighted projects and seeks to emulate them within the relatively constrained area of biomechanics.
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The highly successful Decade of the Brain, 1990-2000, produced both significant scientific progress and a raised awareness of the impact of brain disorder. The achievements of this initiative led to the declaration of the Decade of the Bone and Joint, 2000-2010. This aims "to improve the health-related quality of life for people with musculo-skeletal disorders by working in partnership with all stakeholders to raise awareness, identify needs, empower patients, promote cost-effective prevention and treatment and advance understanding through research to improve prevention and treatment." It has been endorsed by figures of international stature, including Kofi Annan and Pope John Paul II, and is supported by organisations such as the United Nations, the World Health Organisation and the International Red Cross.
BioNet [1], IST-2000-28074, has taken its inspiration from such far-sighted projects and seeks to emulate them within the relatively constrained area of biomechanics. Biomechanics is a diverse and multidisciplinary field, which makes it difficult to create partnerships containing the range and blend of skills necessary to tackle the increasingly complex problems that are arising. It also makes it difficult to create a coherent strategy for future development, that is, to gain widespread agreement on what the fundamental problems of the moment are, and to ensure that they are addressed in a coherent and rigorous way.
Musculo-skeletal conditions are the most common cause of severe long-term pain and physical disability; they affect millions of people across the world. For example, joint diseases currently account for over half of all chronic conditions in persons over 65 years old.
Further, these conditions do not have to be chronic or disabling in order to have a sizeable impact on the lifestyle of the sufferer. Most people will have, at some time, pulled a back muscle or twisted a knee and will thus be able to testify to the discomfort and disruption to normal movement that even such minor complaints can cause. It then becomes easy to comprehend the substantial impact that a more severe, but not necessarily chronic, condition can have on an individual's life.
In addition to the individual cost, the demand for resources to treat and alleviate musculo-skeletal disorders continues to put an increasing strain on national health systems. This strain will be exacerbated by the general demographic trend towards an older population. Not only will a higher proportion of the population suffer from such conditions, but as the average lifespan continues to increase, treatment will be required for longer periods.
Although the medical aspects of biomechanics have the highest profile, it is important in many other areas - sports science is an obvious one - and there are many uses in industry, for example in car design, both in normal use and when involved in a crash. In fact, biomechanics is relevant to any activity in which the body is in motion or in which the body is subjected to physical stress and strain. And while the main focus is always on the human, biomechanics is equally relevant to studies involving animals.
BioNet is funded under the Working Groups Programme of IST. It began in September 2001 and will run until the end of November 2002. The main concept of the project is that biomechanics should confront its multidisciplinary nature and undertake to involve all of its participants in establishing a consensus regarding its major future directions. BioNet will provide a forum within which future priorities can be established, and the means by which responses can be harmonised, so that these priorities are addressed with greater directness and economy.
BioNet will create, within the European biomechanics community, one (or, more likely, several inter-related) Working Groups to allow the development of concerted approaches to issues of high contemporary relevance. Until now, collaboration, particularly across disciplines, has generally been the result of ad hoc meetings and chance acquaintanceships. BioNet will improve communication between the many disciplines involved in biomechanics and thus activate synergies that may, at present, be dormant.
The project also seeks to unite all aspects of the biomechanics community - industrial, educational, clinical, research, charity - into a coherent structure, and will provide an on-going resource to support and co-ordinate collaborative work in biomechanics. Once initiated, much of the future activity will be sustained by the international or European societies that are active in the area.
The central activity of the project is a one-off conference in April 2002, though as its nature is radically different from standard international conferences, we prefer to describe it as the Event. The Event will provide a forum for the discussion of contemporary issues, with a view to gaining widespread agreement on the areas in which concerted activity is likely to produce the greatest benefits.
The Event divides the project into three distinct phases. We are currently in the pre-Event phase, the programme for the Event is now complete, and we are launching a series of discussions to define the topics mostly suited for short and middle term activity. We are greatly assisted in this scene-setting by the existence of the BIOMCH-L mailing list, which is the major medium for communication within the biomechanics community worldwide.
The Event is described more fully below. Post-Event support will be provided to the emerging Working Groups. BIOMCH-L has promised to host mailing lists on specific topics so that the agendas of the different groups can be developed. The whole of this activity will be carefully monitored to ensure that all necessary decisions are taken before the end of the project in November 2002.
The project is very timely because another EC-funded project, VAKHUM, IST-1999-10954, will be completed by June 2002. This project is producing, for the first time, a comprehensive set of morphological and kinematic data, gathered according to published scientific protocols and will provide new opportunities for future work in research, education and industry.
The Event, "Biomechanics in the Decade of the Bone & Joint", will take place in Brussels on 27-29 April 2002. It has an inclusive policy, so registration fees are being kept to a minimum to encourage the widest participation. Fees for students are being kept particularly low to promote the involvement of the next generation of researchers, as are the fees for delegates from Central & Eastern Europe, in line with the initiatives of the European Society of Biomechanics to encourage the rapid development of biomechanics in these countries. The emphasis of the Event is on computational biomechanics.
The programme will start with keynote addresses on the historical development of biomechanics and a survey of some of the current "hot topics" by internationally renowned speakers, including some of the "founding fathers" of biomechanics. This will be followed by a poster session in which all current work in biomechanics will be displayed, arranged by subject, to provide a unique "snapshot" of European biomechanics.
The highlight of the first afternoon is a "Get It Off Your Chest" session in which participants will have the opportunity to make a controversial statement, with a maximum duration of 5 minutes, on a topic in biomechanics on which they feel strongly. There will be no discussion at this point (for reasons that are probably obvious) - an opportunity to reflect on these presentations is provided on the second day. There will also be a chance to hold discussions with like-minded professionals in Birds of a Feather meetings.
The second day begins with two pairs of parallel sessions presented by international speakers specifically selected for their expertise in the areas being considered. There will be an opportunity for a partner search before a panel session in which the previous presentations will be considered and the foundations laid for establishing the specific working groups. Concluding remarks will be made by distinguished speakers from both sides of the Atlantic.
We have been fortunate that so many highly respected figures in biomechanics have agreed to make presentations - it promises to be a landmark event, and one that will provide European biomechanics with a timely impetus in its future development.
Prof. G J Clapworthy
De Montfort University
Dr. Serge Van Sint Jan
Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Dr. Marco Viceconti
Istituti Ortopedici Rizzoli, Italy
Dr. Diane Dan
ESI Software, France
Prof. G J Clapworthy
Dept of Computer & Information Sciences,
De Montfort University,
Milton Keynes MK7 6HP,
UK
Gordon Clapworthy is Professor of Computer Graphics at De Montfort University. His main research interests are medical visualisation, biomechanics, computer graphics, figure animation, robot teleoperation, virtual reality and fundamental graphics algorithms.
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For citation purposes:
Clapworthy, G J. "Bionet: Strategic Development of European Networks in Biomechanics", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/bionet/>
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By Adelheit Stein, Ulrich Thiel and Jürgen Keiper - February 2002
Project COLLATE develops a new type of a WWW-based collaboratory for cultural heritage information. The implemented system provides access to a newly constructed digital library on rare sources of historical film documents. Professional domain experts use the COLLATE system to analyze, evaluate and collaborate on the interpretation and indexing/annotation of the digital repository documents. The hereby provided metadata are managed by an advanced XML-based content manager and an intelligent content and context based retrieval system.
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In
September 2000 an international team of cultural content
providers, film domain experts and technology developers -
together with a designated evaluation partner - started out to
develop and put into practice a new type of collaboratory
in the domain of cultural heritage. The EU-funded project
“COLLATE – Collaboratory for Annotation, Indexing and
Retrieval of Digitized Historical Archive Material”
(IST-1999-20882) is part of the EU DIGICULT programme, and runs
for three years: see the project Web site [1].
During the last few years the idea of collaboratories emerged in the Natural Sciences area and was applied by several disciplines and research groups. As defined by Kouzes et al. [2] a “collaboratory” (merger of the terms collaboration and laboratory) is a virtual centre on the Web, where professionals and lay persons are provided with the means for interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resources, and accessing information stored in digital libraries and archives.
Various collaboratories have been employed since the early 90s, mainly in Natural Sciences, but so far we have found – aside from some systems with very limited functionality – only a few similar efforts in Arts and Humanities. Whereas the organisation and preservation of historical knowledge in Arts and Humanities are still comparable, some of the work processes in the more interpreting sciences are different and need to be supported by appropriate system functionalities. Large collections of important historic and cultural sources are scattered in national archives with no electronic versions available, so that immediate access to and work with this material are severely impeded. On the other hand, there exist many – but mostly informal and non-institutional – contacts between cultural archives constituting specific professional communities. However, effective and efficient technological support for collaborative knowledge working is still missing. Technologically, the World Wide Web can serve both as a standard communication platform for such communities and as a gateway for document-centered digital library applications.
The COLLATE system not only provides the functions of a traditional digital library, but on top of that it employs a generic approach to collaborative knowledge working with cultural sources, i.e. supporting users in their analysis, interpretation, evaluation of the sources and the creation of new knowledge as a result of this work with the material. Therefore, the system and its components are adaptable to heterogeneous cultural domains. As an example application COLLATE focuses on the film domain in general, and in particular on specific questions of historic film documentation like comparative film censorship analysis in several countries. Three major European film archives are providing several thousand digitized multi-format documents on European early 20th century films for COLLATE’s data repository. But in principle the tools and user interfaces developed can easily be adapted to other content domains, types of applications and users.
Designed as a content and context based knowledge working environment for distributed user groups, the COLLATE system supports both individual work and collaboration of domain experts who are analyzing, evaluating, indexing and annotating the material in the multimedia data repository. It continuously integrates the user knowledge thus derived into its metadata repositories, and on this basis can offer improved content-based retrieval functionalities within the information system [3]. Users can therefore both access and create valuable knowledge about the cultural, political and social contexts, which in turn allows other end-users to better retrieve and interpret the material.
Technology development on the one hand and extended empirical investigation of the acceptance of a collaboratory in the cultural domain on the other are the two backbones of the COLLATE project:
Results from both areas of project work strongly influence each other to enable an iterative, dynamic system development. Evaluation steps are explicitly built in, and the users themselves are actively involved throughout the various development cycles.
A first prototype of the COLLATE system was implemented at the end of the first project year, allowing formal cataloguing, content-based indexing and annotation of digitized text documents and document passages [4]. Subsequent system versions will incorporate advanced document preprocessing modules for automatic analysis and indexing of multimedia data, and especially more extended support of the collaboration between users based on an explicit collaborative task model.
COLLATE focuses on the film domain and has built up a large digital repository of rare historic film censorship documents from the 20s and 30s, most of them as yet unavailable in electronic form, but scattered in various archives; and a proportion is not yet even analyzed and catalogued. These documents are highly relevant for film historians analyzing censorship history, as well as for any social scientists. For a subset of significant films the data repository offers in addition enriched documentation, including digitized newspaper articles, photos, stills, posters and film fragments. In-depth analyses and comparison of such documents provide, for example, evidence about different film versions and cuts, which can be used for the reconstruction of lost or damaged films or for the identification of actors and film fragments of unknown origin.
As a prerequisite for collaborative work all material is analyzed, indexed, partly translated, annotated and interlinked by film experts. The COLLATE system provides them with appropriate task-based interfaces for in-depth indexing/annotation and other tasks as well as with supporting knowledge management tools (indexing aids and special keyword lists). End-users may also take an active part in evaluating sources and adding valuable information through annotations. In this way, a growing body of metadata is emerging over time. The system exploits this data by employing advanced XML-based content management and advanced retrieval methods [5]. The final version of the online collaboratory will integrate cutting-edge document processing and management facilities, e.g., XML-based document handling, digital watermarking and semi-automatic segmentation, categorization and indexing of digitized text documents and pictorial material (photos, posters, film fragments).
By combining the results from the manual and automatic indexing procedures, elaborate content-based retrieval mechanisms can be applied. This helps users find what they are actually looking for, to combine evidence from various sources and to interrelate so far unrelated sources and knowledge. Thus, not only the size and richness but also the quality, affordability and acceptability of the information repository are constantly being improved.
The system features innovative models and techniques in the following areas:
Offering content and context based access to the data repository is a crucial feature of COLLATE. To implement an information system with advanced retrieval functions, we must go beyond current practices of merely providing digital reproductions of and simple online access to historic sources. Instead, results from current and previous scholarly work such as evaluating and indexing these sources must be incorporated into the information system, e.g., in the form of metadata and annotations.
COLLATE users are directly and indirectly involved in system development because they participate in enriching the document repository through new sources and successive annotations and indexation. In particular, the focus on annotation as a typical task in the domain of the humanities is central to the COLLATE concept. Annotation as a multifunctional means of in-depth analysis can be done individually but also collaboratively, for example in the form of annotation of annotations, collaborative evaluation and comparison of documents. As a result, a large amount of value-added information is being provided in addition to the digitized documents.
Support of collaborative work goes beyond contemporary groupware products, offering innovative functions such as:
The dynamic accumulation of value-added information through annotations requires the data structures to be scaleable and extensible. In order to capture these dynamics we chose XML as a de facto standard for the encoding of generic document and metadata representation schemata. Through the use of XML we are able to guarantee the generality of our approach, since these schemata can be enriched and tailored to additional sources and knowledge incorporated into our system without any need for re-modeling the whole system. In addition, XML is the basis for the integration of knowledge processing methodology and retrieval functionality in the system. Therefore, the system is capable of capturing the dynamics of collaboration without neglecting the necessary flexibility of scaleable and extensible representation schemata, which can be transferred to other content domains as well.
The COLLATE collaboratory is a multi-functional software package integrating a large variety of functionalities, which are realized by inter-related software modules. It comprises several databases and different document representation schemata. XML is used as the uniform internal representation language for the documents in the repository and the associated metadata as well as for the implementation of the communication protocol among its system modules.
 |
| Figure 1: The COLLATE system is structured into several functional layers |
Three document pre-processing modules are being developed and will be incorporated into the final COLLATE system version:
As shown in Figure 1 the COLLATE system is structured into several functional layers:
Operational Layer – The distributed digital data repository comprises a variety of data, ranging from scanned-in text documents to multimedia data and the accumulated annotations related to one or more of these original data sources.
Domain Metadata Layer – In order to organize the stored data in a way that supports the complex knowledge-intensive tasks users perform suitable tools for metadata management are being provided. The knowledge structures, which are represented by specific XML schemata, constitute the Domain Model. They comply with the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) and CES (Corpus Encoding Standard) metadata standards, but we needed to extend these in order to cope with the rich structure of our domain.
Collaborative Task Layer – The COLLATE system allows a wide variety of user types to access, work with and evaluate the digitized material. A generic task model has been developed for complex working tasks like source edition, identification of lost or cut film scenes, preparation of a virtual exhibition, etc. As some of these tasks can be performed collaboratively, e.g., collaborative inspection and interpretation of source material, a collaboration model is being developed which builds the basis for offering context-dependent interface functions for collaboration between users.
Interface Layer – In order to support the users in accomplishing their tasks COLLATE provides appropriate interfaces for convenient work with the digital documents. In future system versions, these interfaces can be semi-automatically derived from the underlying task model. Certain specialized interface components for annotation, mark-up, editing, search and retrieval are used to facilitate user interaction. The specification of the interface structure also utilizes XML to allow for generic mapping to concrete instantiations (e.g., Java Swing).
As indicated above, communication between these layers is realized through XML-based communication protocols. The implementation employs XML transformations (XSLT) as a basis for the communication infrastructure in the COLLATE system.
The COLLATE system represents a new type of collaboratory supporting work with cultural document sources by innovative task-based interfaces for in-depth content indexing and annotation. In this way, the access and retrieval of content from traditionally scattered and electronically unavailable sources is significantly improved. Furthermore, advanced features of the system - such as digital watermarking, semi-automatic document segmentation and picture analysis - increase the usability of the system.
Dr.
Adelheit Stein
Project manager
Fraunhofer IPSI (Institute for Integrated Publication and
Information Systems)
Dolivostrasse 15
D-64293 Darmstadt
Germany
Phone: +49 6151 869-841
stein@ipsi.fraunhofer.de
<http://www.ipsi.fhg.de/~stein>
Dr. Adelheit Stein is the head coordinator of the COLLATE project. She has been a senior researcher at Fraunhofer-IPSI (formerly GMD-IPSI) since several years. Her background is in Sociology and Philosophy, with a special focus on cognition and social interaction. At IPSI she was involved in several European IT projects and university teaching. Her current research interests include: human-computer interaction, collaboration support, dialogue planning, intelligent user interfaces.
Dr.
Ulrich Thiel
Project manager
Fraunhofer IPSI (Institute for Integrated Publication and
Information Systems)
Dolivostrasse 15
D-64293 Darmstadt
Germany
Phone: +49 6151 869-855
thiel@ipsi.fraunhofer.de
<http://www.ipsi.fhg.de/~thiel>
Dr. Ulrich Thiel is responsible for the technical coordination of the COLLATE system. He holds both a diploma in Computer Science and a PhD in Information Science. Since several years he has been a senior researcher at Fraunhofer-IPSI (formerly GMD-IPSI). He was manager of many EU-funded projects. His research interests include: intelligent information retrieval, dialogue planning, conversational and adaptive information systems.
Jürgen
Keiper
Project manager
Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF
Schaumainkai 41 60596
Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Phone: +49 69 96 12 20 0
keiper@deutsches-filminstitut.de
<http://www.deutsches-filminstitut.de>
Jürgen Keiper is the scientific coordinator of the content-providers and film archives of the COLLATE project. He holds a masters degree from the University of Frankfurt, and his special background is in Theater, Media and Film Sciences. Since several years he has worked for the DIF (German Film Institute) in various research projects. His research interests include: film theory and criticism and social history of film. He is editor of the film journal Film und Kritik.
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For citation purposes:
Stein A, Thiel U and Keiper, J. "Going Beyond Traditional Digital Libraries for Cultural Heritage: The COLLATE Collaboratory", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/collate/>
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By John Perkins - February 2002
John Perkins, Executive Director of the CIMI Consortium, discusses the potential the Open Archives Initiative may hold for museums and talks about how CIMI have been testing the OAI protocol.
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Museums [1] have immensely rich information resources, but, access to much of the kinds of materials museums hold, is often not available through web search engines because it is in databases, dynamically generated, or in some other non-HTML form. These resources constitute what is becoming known as the Hidden Web estimated to contain 400-550 times more content than the commonly defined Web. [2]
If this problem alone were solved and all the Hidden Web resources were suddenly available for indexing the difficulty of finding reliable, useful, precise information would be seriously compounded not alleviated. One way to address this is through collecting and indexing metadata records, rather than indexing the entire contents of HTML pages, thereby providing greater possibilities for precision. This is essentially the traditional library approach of creating descriptive metadata and building union catalogs. However library-like catalogs are expensive to maintain and in the Web world difficult to find and hard to search across.
A particularly promising solution is to explore the utility of combining the best of traditional library and museum techniques such as creating descriptive metadata records in catalogs, with the best of new Internet techniques like large scale, machine harvesting of information. It is possible to consider this because of new developments in Web workable technical protocols, the uptake of XML as a way to package and transfer information, and the development of international standards for describing museum metadata content.
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes technical protocols and standards, collectively called the OAI technical framework, to facilitate the access to research information on the Web. It is based on the premise that a simple, easily implemented technical framework can allow holders of information to create repositories of metadata describing their resources that in turn can be harvested and made available for further processing or use. [3]
A vision of how the OAI protocol might be implemented is offered by the USA's Digital Library Federation. They describe a framework in which:
A data provider agrees to support a simple harvesting protocol and to provide extracts of item-level metadata in a common, minimal-level format in response to harvest requests from trusted service providers. …. A service provider …uses the harvest protocol to collect metadata … possibly after reaching some kind of formal agreement on terms and conditions of use. The service provider is then able to build intellectually useful services, such as catalogs and portals to materials distributed across multiple sites. The framework applies to a wide range of information resources of academic and scholarly interest including printed and electronic texts, science and social science data sets, visual materials, archival collections, geographic information system (GIS) data, sound and music, video, and any other type of resource for which metadata is typically created. [4]
A technical overview of the OAI Protocol and its relevance to museums has been previously described by CIMI [5] and presented at workshops [6].
Because of the perceived potential of OAI for museums CIMI participated as a pre-release tester of the OAI protocol. [7] As part of the test we built a generic OAI-compliant repository [8]. The repository architecture is described in detail in [5]
The initial evaluation demonstrated that the OAI protocol is indeed simple to build. CIMI has limited technical resources and skills but was nonetheless able to successfully build an OAI repository that appears to be useful. Based on the positive experience as an alpha implementer, CIMI plans to continue explorations of the OAI protocol and research its use by museums.
One way is by making the code for the CIMI repository and its associated explanatory materials available for downloading from the CIMI Website. [8] We hope museums will take advantage of its availability to install, experiment and use the protocol.
CIMI is also interested in conducting a more formal, large-scale test of the OAI for museums as a CIMI testbed to begin testing the OAI in real-world applications. As part of this work we plan using OAI V.1.x in combination with scoped extensions and other applications necessary for aggregation processes (e.g. editorial control, content management and enhancement, registry) to harvest and collect museum metadata. 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 addition to the CIMI-proposed research, which is still in the planning stages, individual CIMI members are proceeding with investigations of their own.
Australian Museums Online (AMOL) are OAI-enabling their regional servers beginning with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in early 2002. The regional server network is what allows smaller institutions to supply object records to the National Database of Museum Objects [9]. When completed the regional server network will rely entirely on the OAI protocol and not an ad-hoc collection of statically and dynamically generated html pages.
The Canadian federal Department of Canadian Heritage (PCH) in conjunction with the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and the National Library of Canada are experimenting with OAI as a method of harvesting and aggregating object records for the about-to-be-launched Canada Place Portal.
The Netherlands-based museum software company ADLiB Information Systems has implemented the OAI protocol in its Internet Server module that works in conjunction with any standard CGI Web server to publish museum data providing the potential for automated harvesting from a broadly distributed collection of institutions. ADLiB expects implementations where groups of museums such as Maritime Digital or IGEM will eventually employ OAI to create a joint web presence.
The Mellon Foundation has sponsored a comprehensive set of experiments in seven USA institutions to demonstrate the kinds of discovery and retrieval services that OAI might enable [10]. One of these projects involves the Research Libraries Group, Inc. researching how library catalogs might be transformed through the harvesting of RLG database records by an Internet search engine such as Google. Also with Mellon Foundation support, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and the University of Michigan (UM) are collaborating on a joint project involving digital library objects and special collections. The UIUC proposal [11] gives a particularly detailed description of a number of relevant research questions and the nature of issues to be resolved for OAI to become a successful tool.
Regardless of the services developed there will be a number of issues relating to widespread adoption of the OAI protocol in the museum community. There is a need for the museum community to test hypotheses, assertions, and issues such as:
At this early stage of implementation and because OAI is designed to be a machine-based protocol it is difficult to find many human-consumable examples of implementations. The OAI Web site offers a useful Repository Explorer and links to tools [12] as does the CIMI site [8].
Both CIMI and many of our members have experience in the metadata harvesting business. It is this experience that motivates us to explore the OAI Protocol as an enabling technology to facilitate access to resources by making it easier for museums to expose and collect metadata. Sustained testing of the OAI protocol seems a logical and sensible research initiative that will bring us closer to making the rich information resources museums hold more widely available to researchers and other users.
The author would like to thank Carl Lagoze for his contributions to CIMI's OAI research and Henry Stern for developing the CIMI Repository. Thanks are also due to the Open Archives Initiative, the Digital Library Federation, the Mellon Foundation, Bert Degenhart Drenth, and all CIMI members for enabling the author to participate in the development of CIMI's thinking on the use of OAI in museums.
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John Perkins
Executive Director
CIMI Consortium
Canada
Phone: +1 902 4295392
jperkins@cimi.org
http://www.cimi.org/>
John Perkins is Executive Director of the Consortium for the Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI). 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:
Perkins, J. "Disclosing Digital Cultural Wealth: Museums and the Open Archives Initiative", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/activate/>
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By Monika Segbert - February 2002
In December 2001 the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, based in New York, approved the funding of a new project in the Russian State Library (RSL) in Moscow. The project will have a life time of 18 months, and a budget of $ 1,2 million. It will build on the results of the TACIS project ‘Creation of an Information System of the Russian State Library’ (1998-2000) and will be managed by the British Council in Russia. Monika Segbert reveals all.
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The aim of the project is to support the modernisation of the RSL to become one of the leading digital libraries of the world, and to improve Russian and international users’ access to the information resources of the library. The project will consist of 5 closely interrelated components:
The EU – Tacis financed project “Creation of an Information System for the Russian State Library” resulted in an OPAC of some ½ million records covering parts of the 19th catalogue of Russian writers, dissertations, the catalogue of foreign books and recent acquisitions as from 1998. This is only a beginning in a library of this size, but a good basis to build on. This component will result in electronic cataloguing records of relevant literature from Russia of the last 20 years, which is the material most in demand. This will open up world-wide access to the bulk of Russian publications from 1980 onwards; it will also be the pre-condition for the automation of the circulation of items within the library (see component 4) which will greatly facilitate local use.
The project will use the files of the Russian Book Chamber from 1980 – 1998 to create 1 million machine readable bibliographic records in MARC21 format.
The Russian State Library houses a number of special collections, which contain rare items of interest to Russian and foreign scholars. The collection most in demand by scholars visiting the RSL is the collection of music scores. This collection is consulted by some 9000 users per annum, who request 40 000 items for consultation. Statistical evidence shows that 95% of these users come from the scholarly community. The collection has a unique value in that 60% of items are from Russian composers and composers from the former Soviet states, such as Ukraine, Belarus, Tadjikistan etc. The catalogue contains some 380 000 records.
Currently the up to 5000 daily users of the RSL, the majority of which come from the education and research community, have to wait several hours until the books requested by them are delivered, or indeed only to find out that the book is on loan. The creation of electronic records of the RSL collections most in demand, e.g. the last 20 years, and the collection of musical scores, will create the electronic pre-requesite to start implementing the automated circulation module of the Aleph 500 integrated library software acquired under the Tacis project.
The main goal of this component is to ensure maximum benefit from the investment in the project by addressing management issues related to the introduction of new technologies in a series of workshops for senior and middle management of the Library, predominantly those directly or indirectly involved in the project.
The methodologies, processes and results that will be defined, applied and created in the course of this project will be of interest well beyond the Russian State Library, for example to the professional community in Russia, to national libraries and other major libraries in the former Soviet Union States, and to major libraries in other countries with special interest in the expanded access to the RSL collections. An international conference envisaged for Spring 2003 will present and discuss the progress and results of the projects.
[1] The Mellon-funded project builds on the results of a project awarded in 1998 by the EU Tacis programme, “Creation of an Information System for the Russian State Library”; this project resulted in the selection of an integrated library system (Aleph 500), the implementation of the WebOPAC and online cataloguing, the creation of a catalogue database of ½ million records through retroconversion, the purchase and installation of hard- and software, and extensive staff training. The main goal of this project was to start opening access to the collections of the Library to national and international scholars. This project finished in May 2001.
[2] The Russian State Library, the former Lenin Library (fondly known as Leninka), is the national library of Russia, the largest library of Europe and the second largest in the world, holding over 42 million items. The Library has grown from the private book collection of count N.P. Rumyantsev (Chancellor of the Russian Empire) which he bequeathed to the nation for the purposes of “good education”. In 1831 the library, archive and museum collections of Rumyantsev were opened to the public in his St. Petersburg house. At that time the total size of the library collection was 28200 volumes and 710 manuscripts. In 1861 both the Museum and the Library were transferred to Moscow.
From its very beginning, the library has received a copy of all Russian books, newspapers and journals and its holdings have expanded to include private collections of prominent statesmen and scientists. In 1918 after the capital of the country was moved to Moscow, the Rumyantsev library became the main library of the country. In 1925 the library was renamed the V.I. Lenin State Library of the USSR and acquired the status of the national library of all Soviet states. In 1992 the library was renamed the Russian State Library, retaining its status as a national library, alongside the National Library in St. Petersburg.
The Library is unique in comprehensiveness and universality of its collections, which now contain some 42 million items: it has a rich collection of manuscripts starting form the 6th century; the collections contain archives, personal collections and autographs of prominent figures in Russian culture; special collections include such rare cultural heritage as old photographs, etching, cinema posters, rare maps with fine drawings, albums, precious musical scores. The Oriental Centre of the Library is famous for its Chinese and Japanese collections.
The Library also fulfils the functions of a public library, welcoming up to 5 000 visitors and circulating up to 35 000 items daily; over half of the users come from the academic community.
[3] THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION, is a Not-for-Profit Corporation under the laws of the State of New York. The purpose of the Foundation is to "aid and promote such religious, charitable, scientific, literary, and educational purposes as may be in the furtherance of the public welfare or tend to promote the well-doing or well-being of mankind."
Under this broad charter, the Foundation currently makes grants on a selective basis to institutions in higher education; in cultural affairs and the performing arts; in population; in conservation and the environment; and in public affairs.
[4] The overall management of the project will be undertaken by The British Council, Development and Training Services (DATS). DATS is a project management agency, which delivers technical assistance and project management services to multilateral donors such as the European Commission, the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development. The British Council is committed to library and information development and has extensive world-wide experience of managing library and information projects, and has worked with the Russian State Library since the early 1990s. In 1993 the British Council organised familiarisation visits for eight senior RSL staff to several European libraries. This initiative was funded by the EC and managed by the British Council. In 1994-1995 the British Council also managed a consultancy which resulted in the production of a report 'The Russian State Library: Planning for automation, 1995 - 2005 (Project definition report)' funded by the EC DG XIII. Between December 1998 and January 2000, the British Council successfully managed the implementation of the European Commission funded project “Creation of an Information System for the Russian State Library”.
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Monika Segbert MBE FLA(hon) Dipl.Bibl.
Project Management and Consultancy
Via Fondiglie 5-7
60030 Rosora (An)
Italy
info@monikasegbert.com
http://www.monikasegbert.com>
Monika Segbert provides advice and management expertise to multi-national projects in the cultural sector. She currently works with the Soros Foundation's Open Society Institute in Budapest to create a multi-country consortium of library consortia in 40+ countries to harness their buying power for affordable access to electronic journals and with DG Information Society of the European Commission to co-ordinate 25 new projects trialling the application of new ICT's in libraries, museums and archives in the EU and the new accession states of Central and Eastern Europe.
From 1998 - 2000 she was based in Moscow as the team leader of the EU -Tacis project for the Creation of an Information System for the Russian State Library. From 1995 -1998 she worked with the European Commission DGXIII Telematics for Libraries programme, with primary responsibility for developing research cooperation for the sector with the new accession countries. Prior to that Monika Segbert served in the British Council in Germany as Head, Libraries, Information and Books.
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For citation purposes:
Segbert, M. "News from the Russian State Library", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/eifl/>
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By Edwin Klijn - February 2002
This article provides an impression of the first year of the SEPIA working group on descriptive models for photographic materials. The working group has analysed existing methods to describe photographic materials, focusing on the consensus and trying to find solutions that would enable registrars to describe photographs adequately for different purposes. The working group does not aim to develop another standard model but wants to provide tools for description of photographic materials that accept the fact that many institutions use different descriptive models.
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If you don't find it in the index, look very carefully
through the entire catalogue.
(Unknown, Sears, Roebuck, and Co. Consumer's Guide, 1897)
In 1999 the European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA) initiated a project aimed at the long-term preservation of all kind of photographic materials and defining the role of new technology in collection management, called SEPIA (Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access) [1]. The project was set up explicitly to bring together representatives from different types of institutions that hold photographs: libraries, archives and museums, as well as from research institutes. SEPIA was funded by the European Union under the Culture 2000 programme, initially for one year, which was extended to another three years last year.
SEPIA has become bigger, now representing 17 partners from 10 different countries. Its objectives remain the same: to actively promote exchange of ideas and experiences on a cross-institutional, national and international level by organising training sessions, exhibitions and public events and doing research on specific topics related to preservation of photographic materials.
The SEPIA working group on descriptive models focuses on descriptive models as they are currently used in relation to photographic collections. It consists of representatives from the National Library of Spain, Stockholm City Museum, the Finnish Museum of Photography, the Norwegian Museum Authority (Secretariat for Historical Photography) and the European Commission on Preservation and Access (project management). All working group members have hands-on expertise with describing photographic collections at their own institutions.
The starting point for the working group was the findings of the survey on photographic collections in Europe, carried out in the first year of the SEPIA project [2]. This survey, to which 141 European institutions (archives, libraries, museums and other cultural heritage organisations) with photographic collections responded, showed that many institutions did not use a standard descriptive model for their photographic materials. Those that did use standard descriptions often used different models. Also, many institutions used descriptive models that can be applied to non-photographic materials as well.
In general, institutions in Europe use a wide variety of descriptive models for describing their photographic collections. They share one common factor: hardly ever are they specifically geared to description of photographic materials. Quite often the rules of certain elements in descriptive models are stretched to make an adequate description of the photographic collection possible. When two institutions use General International Standard Archival Description - ISAD(G) to describe their collections, this does not automatically mean that their descriptions are similar. There can be differences in the selection of elements to be used, but also in the interpretation of ISAD(G) rules and elements.
But what elements make an ‘adequate description’ for photographic materials? The main challenge for the working group and the other SEPIA partners involved will be to develop a set of elements that is essential for description of a photographic collection. This data element set is not meant to replace existing descriptive models, but it should function as an advisory model that can be applied to the needs and requirements of a specific institution.
Another task of the working group will be to formulate recommendations to help those in charge of photographic collections to deal with descriptions in ‘the new environment’. Many institutions have been lured by the possibilities of the Internet to publish (part of) their photographic collections online. Yet, many existing descriptions do not meet up with the specific demands of a search-and-retrieval system, simply because they have not been created for this specific purpose. The working group will do further research on this issue, starting with an expert meeting about search-and-retrieval, which will be held at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid on 29 and 30 November 2001 [24].
One of the primary undertakings of the working group was to do further detailed research into how institutions describe photographic materials, what problems they have to cope with when describing photographic materials and the circumstances under which institutions choose or do not choose a particular descriptive model. An analysis was made of descriptive models currently applied to describe photographic materials. This working document provided a more detailed impression of how photographic materials are described in practice, elaborating on the results of the 1999 SEPIA survey [3].
On the 26 and 27th of April Stockholm City Museum hosted an expert meeting on descriptive models [4], where experts had been invited to share their experiences and participate in discussions. The working group has meanwhile formulated further recommendations. In both meetings the need for adequate descriptions for photographic materials was frequently emphasised.
A good description is the key to every collection; it makes a photograph visible, for the researcher, the registrar or the occasional visitor. It opens up a collection, providing access and enabling users to find what they are looking for. At the same time it offers an opportunity to register administrative information about the collection or item; how it was acquired, its physical condition, any access restrictions and similar management information.
The appreciation of photographic items, not only as an art form but also a source of (historical) information has stimulated an increasing public demand. Providing access has become more urgent than ever before. New technological developments offer new possibilities, but do not automatically produce answers to every problem. In some cases it still remains a question of old wine in new bottles. In a recently held survey of art libraries in the UK, many of the frequently mentioned problems that were recorded, sound all too familiar [5]. Determining the depth of indexing, what aspect of the image to register and the lack of information on the image are specific, 'traditional' cataloguing challenges; they have been there ever since the very moment people started cataloguing. These problems will not be solved by any advanced, automated system, but remain subject to human interpretation, defying standardized solutions.
The quality of descriptions can determine the success or failure of a digitization project. The reliability of a search-and-retrieval system depends to a large extent on the quality of the descriptions. Since describing is so labour intensive it can absorb a considerable, frequently underestimated part of the budget [6]. However, digitizing a photographic collection can often be a unique chance to catch up on cataloguing backlogs [7]. By providing digital derivatives of the originals, descriptions can be accompanied by visual references, thereby improving access.
With the ongoing development of the Internet and the advancements of network systems institutions holding photographic collections are tempted to make their collections interoperable and accessible on a national or international level. Initiatives like that are currently in progress on a national level in Norway (Feltkatalogen) [8], Sweden (ARKIS project) [9] and the Netherlands (FOTIOS-project) [10]. On an international level initiatives like the EVA (European Visual Archives)-project [11] and the EUAN (European Union Archive Network)-project [12] attempt to create Internet applications which allow users to search through multiple collections. One of the crucial parts of all these initiatives is to synchronise existing descriptions in such a way that they can be matched on a central level [13]. This is sometimes done by using an ‘intelligent’ search tool that allows cross-collection search-and-retrieval or by synchronization on the level of the different descriptions. Usually synchronization takes far more work, but may provide better results for search-and-retrieval purposes. Anyhow the issue of consistent, reliable descriptions can be very important for a project's failure or success.
Describing photographs takes a lot of time and expertise. Decisions are made on what part of the collection will be described, what level (every single photograph or subseries, series, subcollection or collection), what descriptive model will be used and what are considered to be the minimal requirements for an adequate description.
Regularly applied selection criteria for describing are: frequency of use, rareness and physical condition. These criteria can differ from collection to collection, but especially with large collections establishing selection criteria in advance can be very useful. When the Oslo City Museum started to use the Feltkatalogen [14] for their approximately 520,000 photographic items, initially every single photograph of an arbitrary part of the collection was described. After some time the Museum realised that the collection described was of limited interest to the public so it was decided to introduce selection criteria such as user needs, age and photographic technique to make the process of describing more efficient.
The way photographs are described depends for a large part on the nature of the collection. A photograph can be appreciated because of its value as an object (e.g. a rare, obscure photographic technique), its content ( e.g. portrait, landscape, event), its artistic value (e.g. work of a famous photographer) or a combination between these elements.
Most institutions look at their photographs, either as objects or as visual documents, or as something in between; this can influence the method of description. In general, those institutions that consider their photographs as objects are inclined to put more emphasis on the material aspects (photographic technique, dimensions, condition, etc.). When the content is the most significant feature of a collection, information about the 'what, where, when' aspects of the photograph will be highlighted.
Basically, the starting point is usually the role of a photographic collection in the organizational structure of an institution. If the photographic collection is just a part of the whole, the way the other materials are described can have a large impact on how the photographs are described. For instance, many archives, libraries and museums prefer one descriptive model for all their materials, since they find it more convenient to maintain one system than many different ones. Sometimes registrars have no choice but to use the institutional standard descriptive model to describe their photographic materials. Since most standard descriptive models are not specifically designated for photographic materials, they are often forced to stretch fields and rules considerably.
The size of the photographic collection in relation to the available resources can also influence the method of description. Especially institutions with very large collections usually opt for a 'top-down approach'. International descriptive standards like ISAD(G) [15] and AACR2 [16] both support multi-level description, allowing registrars to describe fonds, subfonds, series, items within one and the same model.
The 'top-down' approach can be a very useful method to increase control over a large collection. For instance, the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, holding about 600,000 photographic prints from both 19th and 20th century and about 700,000 negatives mainly from the 20th century, initially started to describe their collection at a high level for the publication of the inventory in 1989. From there they have adopted a strategy for cataloguing, using specific selection criteria such as user needs or conservation reasons to determine the level of description necessary for each part of the collection [17].
Apart from the practical advantages of a ‘top-down’ approach, multi-level description makes it easier to determine the correlation between different parts of a collection. A frequently heard complaint about item-level descriptions is that it is difficult to describe the relationship between the different items. Multi-level description can link every item to other related items or parts of the collection.
Another aspect that can influence the method of description is the availability of trained staff. Especially smaller institutions often lack specialized staff to describe photographic materials. Limited availability of (trained) staff sometimes urges institutions to look for other solutions. For the Swedish ARKIS 1 project about 1,000 unemployed people were called in to produce as many as 5 million records in two years' time [18]. The Netherlands Institute for War Documentation has a team of senior volunteers that provides descriptions for many of the Institute's photographs. After putting the German Colonial Society collection online the Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt encouraged their users to send e-mails with suggestions to improve the descriptions [19].
In the SEPIA survey mentioned earlier 50 out of 120 respondents did not use a standard descriptive model, but their own models. The other institutions mainly used ISAD(G), ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description), MARC (Machine-Readable Cataloguing Record) to describe their photographs [20]. Other research, like for instance the ARLIS survey, also shows that, even in a relatively homogeneous group of predominantly art libraries, there is still a great variety in use of descriptive models [21].
Even if institutions use the same standard descriptive models, their interpretation of the same elements can be quite different. The role of interpretation becomes more and more important as the original model is not actually meant for describing photographic collections. ISBD, for instance, is actually a standard to describe library collections. In order to be able to include 'non-book materials' a specialised version of ISBD, ISBD(NBM) was developed. ISBD (NBM) is used a kind of guidance for the development national interpretations. Sometimes these national guidelines are again interpreted on an institutional level [22].
The lack of uniformity can be explained by many different circumstances mentioned above. Despite all the different approaches, when analysing different descriptive models used for photographic materials, there are a number of elements that almost every registrar will agree on. At the Stockholm meeting all 21 participants were asked to choose out of 53 elements 15 that they considered essential for an adequate description of a photograph. Elements like inventory number, creator/photographer, topical term, title, date of creation, photographic technique, copyright, location number, size, geographical location, date of acquisition, picture caption, colour/ b/w, custodian history and note area ranked high on the priority lists. When respondents to the ARLIS survey were asked how they formally described their images elements like artist/photographer, ID number, title, physical description, place name and date were frequently mentioned [23].
Without going into details about rules and interpretations, it may be possible to deduce some elements that any adequate description of a photographic item/material/object ought to contain. One of the aims of SEPIA in the three years to come will be to design and implement such a minimal model for description of photographic materials.
 |
| Figure 1: Stockholm model |
In general, the participants to the Stockholm meeting agreed that a descriptive model for photographic materials should contain information about the object, the content and the creator or photographer. Depending on the specific purpose of description (public, management or provenance) it should contain elements to facilitate access for the general public, elements related to collection and preservation management and elements with information about the creator/photographer, provenance and authority posts.
In the Amsterdam working group meeting the definitions in relation to the Stockholm model were refined. The ‘public’ part should contain search and retrieval elements of content, ‘management’ should include identification and physical description elements for administration and preservation purposes and ‘provenance’ is meant to include elements about the creator and the history of the item.
Another requirement that was mentioned on the SEPIA expert meeting -and that was also discussed in more detail on the working group meeting-was the facility of multi-level description. In the working group the basic idea behind ISAD(G), re-using the same elements for different levels, was considered to be a practical and desired feature. There should at least be a distinction between individual and grouping level. It is up to the preferences of a specific institution to choose the number and the exact names (fonds, subfonds, series, etc) of these groupings.
The Stockholm participants also expressed the idea that the model should provide a basis for possible future interoperability with other collections. In order to do so use of thesauri and controlled terminology lists in relation to specific parts of a description of photographic collections, like for instance photographic techniques, should be stimulated. The SEPIA working group considers it to be one of its primary tasks to integrate existing controlled terminology lists for description of photographic materials. So far research has proved that, although (on institutional and national level) some controlled lists are available, on an international level they are often lacking.
The complexity of a photographic item makes describing very complicated. In the working group meeting in Amsterdam a distinction was made between the object (the physical apparition) and the image (the contents of the object). Main difference is that an object only has one image. An image, however, can have more objects (e.g. a negative, a print, a digital derivative, etc.). The object on which the image appears for the first time is commonly considered to be ‘the original’. When describing a photographic item the object and the image are described at the same time.
In short the ‘consensus’ model (colloquially called SEPIADES after ‘SEPIA Data Element Set’), will be build on the ground structure with the following basic ideas:
Every element can be:
a. mandatory : it should always be filled out
b. strongly recommended: should be filled out with a value if the information is appropriate, but if not it can be left blank
c. optional: could be filled out with a value if the information is appropriate, but if not it can be left blank
One of the challenges of SEPIA for the next two years will be to develop a model for description of photographic materials that would include elements for an adequate and efficient description of photographic materials, according to the ground structure formulated in this first year. By organising national SEPIA meetings on descriptive models and using the SEPIA Web site(24)as a platform for discussion throughout the project, the working group encourages all experts in the field to give their feedback, realising that we can use all the help we can get on the long and winding road that lies ahead of us.
Partners are:
Associate partners are:
and
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Edwin
Klijn
Project Manager on Descriptive Models
European Commission on Preservation and Access
edwin.klijn@bureau.knaw.nl
<http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa>
Edwin Klijn is Project Manager of the SEPIA working group ‘descriptive models for photographic materials’ and co-author of ‘In the Picture. Digitisation and Preservation of European Photographic Collections (Amsterdam, 2000). He has been working as Digitisation Officer at the European Commission on Preservation and Access (ECPA) since 1999 and was involved in several digitisation projects, specialising in database publishing on the Internet.
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For citation purposes:
Klijn, E. "SEPIA: Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/sepia/>
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By Esther Gregory and Michael Ryan - February 2002
The CHILDE (Children's Historical Literature Disseminated Throughout Europe) [1] project was developed by Buckinghamshire County Library Service and European team, and six partners from Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Ireland and the UK. In November 2000 a grant of £60,000/ €100,000 was awarded to the project.
The CHILDE partners worked together during the next 12 months to:
The following article describes this process and draws some conclusions from its success.
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In the early part of 2000, a chance conversation between two local government officers in Buckinghamshire sparked off an idea that led to the development of a unique cultural and educational project, CHILDE. The idea itself, to create a Web site based on Europe's rich but disparate heritage of historic children's book collections, would have remained merely a distant vision had a partner search, carried out through the European Cultural Contact Points, not proved so successful. An impressive range of organisations responded to the initial project brief and, after further discussion and exchange of ideas, committed themselves to a bid for funding from the European Commission's Culture 2000 programme. A detailed project plan and budget were devised and these formed the basis for the eventual bid to the Commission.
The project, which by the submission date of May 2000 had acquired the name CHILDE (Children's Historical Literature Disseminated throughout Europe) was developed by Buckinghamshire County Council's Library Service and European team, along with:
Technical advice and assistance was provided by the Higher Education Digitisation Service (HEDS) at the University of Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire County Council's IT Unit.
The bid was successful and in October 2000 a grant of €100,000 was awarded to the scheme. The inaugural project meeting was organised for the first week in December and on a windswept and rainy day in Brussels, CHILDE was born.
The key objectives of the CHILDE project were to digitise 1,000 illustrations from six European historical children's book collections and to display these on a specially created Web site. Consideration was given to the digitisation of text as well as images but the constraints of time and budget, along with the idea that this project would have scope for such further development in the future, led us to decide to concentrate the digitisation on visual illustration. The site was would also feature an Education Programme built around four main themes:
In addition, a Best Practice Report, drawing on the project partners' experiences of collection management, preservation, cataloguing and utilisation would be included on the site. All of this was to be achieved with the assistance of Email, fax, phone and through four trans-national meetings to be held in four partner countries over one year, although in the event this was to prove to be an eleven-month year. The culmination of the project would be an international conference, provisionally entitled 'Opening the Portal,' to be held in the lead partner's home locality of Buckinghamshire. At the time of writing, all of these objectives have been met, with some aspects, for example the Web site's underlying database, having developed a far greater, and necessary, sophistication than was at first envisaged.
Aside from the Education Programme and the Best Practice Report, which were written and edited by all of the project partners, based on their professional knowledge and expertise and using the simple expedient of Word, the main technological and organisational challenges lay in the digitisation and Web site creation elements of the project. But before any of this could begin it was first necessary to select 1,000 images from a joint 'project collection' of almost one million books. The partners at the inaugural meeting in Brussels laid down a number of strict selection criteria. It was agreed that the four Education Programme themes, outlined above, were to guide this selection and that, partly with an eye on copyright considerations, we would only include images published before 1890.
The Project Plan, devised with the technical assistance of HEDS, called for the chosen images to be photographed and produced as 35mm slides. The digitisation process itself would be based on these slides. In this way the handling and transportation of many rare and fragile books would be reduced to an absolute minimum. Having agreed in Brussels on the selection criteria, each partner then commissioned professional photographers to produce two sets of 35mm slides. Again taking the advice of HEDS, considerable emphasis was placed on the importance of the quality both of the photography itself and of the physical characteristics of the resulting slides. All partners were agreed that the final images on the Web site would need to be of the highest possible standard if they were to be of real value to their end users. Early in 2000 a 'benchmark selection' of slides was taken to HEDS and subjected to a series of trial scans to highlight any potential problems. It is with no sense of embarrassment that we can state that a very small number of slides, for a variety of reasons, did not initially pass this self imposed quality test and that as a result, some illustrations were re-photographed as a guarantee of quality. The CHILDE site itself now bears witness to the success of this important aspect of the project.
Another important consideration was that of copyright. Although the original illustrations were now free of the European copyright legislation's 70-year statute of limitation on visual images, it was necessary for the photographers to formally assign copyright of the photographs to the CHILDE partnership.
Once the slides had been produced by each partner, using their
own choice of photographer, they were posted to the Project
Co-ordinator at her office in Chesham Library in Buckinghamshire.
From here they were taken to HEDS at the University of
Hertfordshire. HEDS organised the scanning and the production of
2700 dpi resolution master tif images, whose high definition
would compensate for the slight loss of detail intrinsic in the
photography process. From these master images CD ROMs with jpeg
thumbnail and screen sized images, along with their unique file
names, were produced for use on the Web.
The creation of the database, which would hold all the required bibliographic and image data, was in many ways the most important topic that the project team discussed at its second meeting, held in January 2001 in Dublin. Colleagues from Dublin City Public Libraries undertook the initial work of creating the database, using Microsoft Access. There then followed a period of time during which the draft database was bounced back and forth by email between the partners until a consensus was reached on the range and naming of fields. For Buckinghamshire County Council's I.T. Unit, who were providing essential technical support to the project, the reconciling of these different versions of the database was a major issue. By the time of the third project meeting in Bologna in May the design of the database was beginning to feel like a project in itself. However, all of the partners agreed on the final shape of the database and the construction of the CHILDE site moved on
The major design consideration was to understand how users would want to search the site and also, crucially, who we intended or expected those users to be. It had been agreed at the outset of the project that researchers, librarians, teachers and private individuals with an interest in historic children's bibliography would constitute the main audience for the site, but a plea was also made for children. In other words, the site designer would need to combine visual elegance with an ease of operation that would enable a wide range of users to find and make use of the site's various components.
The designer used Microsoft FrontPage to create the site pages. These were then enhanced e.g. through the addition of special language tags so that non-visual browsers could understand the text. Further manual additions were made to the site, including meta-data, such as keywords in various languages, to help promote the site with search engines. The designer also made a simple but very effective use of the European Union's signature colours of blue and yellow.
The database was interrogated via an Active Serve Page (ASP). This was essential in order to coordinate changes being made to the database by the project partners e.g. the names of searchable fields. A few JavaScript 'tweaks' were then added to the ASP to allow the search to focus on the field selected.
Once the various elements were in a sufficiently developed state (please note, we have not used the word 'complete' here) the trial site was placed in the development area of Buckinghamshire County Council's own site, where it was hosted on an Internet Information Server 5 (IIS5) - a Microsoft product that specifically supports FrontPage extensions.
Initially this trial site used only images from the Buckinghamshire Early Children's Book Collection and it was with a considerable sense of excitement that the CHILDE partners were soon able to make use of the Search page to seek out pictures and bibliographic data. As soon as the first few trial searches were undertaken it was clear that in addition to producing detailed book and image data, the user's computer screen would be filled with images of startling clarity. The site worked!
Having got this far and having demonstrated that all the
development work on the site was producing the results we wanted,
it was now necessary for the project partners to complete their
bibliographic entries on their parts of the database. It also
remained for us all to complete work on writing and editing the
Best Practice Reports and the Education Programme. And organise
publicity and promotional events in all partner countries and
organisations to tie in with the official Web site launch week in
September. Oh, and also plan, prepare for and promote the
transnational 'Opening the Portal' conference scheduled for the
19th October 2001. This was nothing if not a busy project!
Eventually however all of this work was achieved and the final
writing up, budget balancing, invoice chasing, and general
managerial tidying up could be done. Less than a year after the
project's first transnational meeting in Brussels, the product
all of the partners' ideas, efforts and continued commitment had
been realised and CHILDE was ready to face the world. Efforts
were made to register the site with the major Internet search
engines and by the end of October 2001, after a few short weeks
of existence, the CHILDE Web site had received 17,761 visits!
Before embarking on CHILDE, the authors spoke to people who had already been involved with other European Commission funded projects. Through this we gained a valuable insight into what should go right and what could go wrong with such a project. To go into detail about this would effectively require a whole new article, but we would like to just highlight some aspects of the way that this project developed that could offer pointers to other projects' futures.
We hope that tomorrow's CHILDE has far to go. It was part of the original vision of the project that one of its outcomes would be the establishment of the foundations of a European network of historical children's book collections. At the time of writing, these foundations are in place. The opportunity has been created for all interested individuals and organisations to meet and build on these foundations in order to establish a European network and seek the resources necessary to give it life. All of the CHILDE project partners are aware of, and indeed are participants in, the considerable international work that is going on in the field of historical children's literature. We are also aware that the CHILDE Web site has the potential to become the principal European site for this type of digitisation and Internet activity. Now that would be a great future for this particular offspring of Culture 2000.
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Esther Gregory
CHILDE Project Co-ordinator
Buckinghamshire County Library Service
County Library Headquarters
Gallery Suite
County Hall
Walton Street
Aylesbury
Bucks
HP20 1UU
esther_childe@hotmail.com
<http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/>
Esther Gregory worked for Buckinghamshire Library Service for 6 years. In 1999 she completed a two year postgraduate in Information Management and became Children's Librarian at Aylesbury Lending Library. Finally in the year 2000 she took on the role of Project Co-ordinator for the CHILDE project. Since writing this article, Esther has taken up the post of Virtual Library Development Manager with Bedfordshire Library Service.
Michael Ryan
CHILDE Project Manager/Principal Learning Support Officer:
Buckinghamshire County Library Service
County Library Headquarters
Gallery Suite
County Hall
Walton Street
Aylesbury
Bucks
HP20 1UU
mryan@buckscc.gov.uk
<http://www.buckscc.gov.uk/>
Michael Ryan has worked as a teacher and librarian for 30 years. He currently manages a number of projects, including the CHILDE project. He has written articles for professional journals on various aspects of children's and educational librarianship. Other publications include 'Computers for young people: a select booklist' (YLG) and the 'Buckinghamshire Early Children's Book Collection' (BCC), with Lesley Kumiega. He was until recently a member of the Library Association's Youth Libraries Committee and Chair of the School Libraries Group.
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For citation purposes:
Gregory, E. and Ryan, M. "Bringing CHILDE into the World", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/childe/>
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By Carol Peters - February 2002
Carol Peters reports on the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF), an initiative that provides an infrastructure for the testing and evaluation of information retrieval systems operating on European languages. This activity first began in 1997 in the United States as a track in TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference series) but since 2000 has been coordinated in Europe under the auspices of the IST programme of the European Commission. In this brief overview, she describes the organization of the annual CLEF evaluation campaigns, lists the main results, and outlines plans for the future.
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The popularity of the Internet and the consequent global availability of networked information sources for an increasingly vast public have led to a strong demand for tools that permit the user to find information wherever and however it is stored, regardless of language boundaries. This demand has been stimulated by the fact that the Internet is no longer an English-only preserve and other language content is growing rapidly. It is estimated that by 2005 the non-English speaking Internet population will be approximately 80% and non-English content will be well over 50% [1].
As English is the first language of only about 5% of the world’s population, there is no doubt that this figure will rise steadily in the next decade with the Asian languages occupying a growing percentage. There is, therefore, a strong demand for efficient cross-language systems that allow users to search document collections in multiple languages and retrieve relevant information in a form that is useful to them, even when they have little or no linguistic competence in the target languages. However, such systems are not easy to develop and work is generally still in an experimental stage. Approaches currently being tested imply the integration of tools and methodologies from the fields of information retrieval, natural language processing and human-computer interaction among others. An intensive process of system testing and tuning is thus needed before the separate components can be implemented successfully in end user applications.
The aim of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is to assist this process by (i) providing an infrastructure for the testing and evaluation of systems operating on European languages, and (ii) creating test-suites of reusable data which can be employed by system developers for benchmarking purposes. These objectives will be achieved through the organization of a series of annual evaluation campaigns.
CLEF has established strong links with two successful IR system evaluation campaigns held in the United States and Japan: the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) series organized by the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) [2], and the NACSIS Test Collection for Information Retrieval (NTCIR) sponsored by the National Institute for Informatics of Tokyo [3]. Both initiatives include tracks for cross-language retrieval system evaluation (NIST will focus on English-Arabic retrieval in the next years; NTCIR is working on the evaluation of systems for mono- and cross-language retrieval for Asian languages). The three initiatives (US, Asian and European) aim at creating a network of complementary activities in the cross-language system evaluation area.
In this report, we describe the organization of the CLEF evaluation campaigns and list the main results achieved so far. The final section gives an idea of our plans and hopes for future campaigns. For more details, the interested reader is referred to [4].
CLEF represents a continuation and expansion of an activity that first began in the United States within the TREC conference series and is now coordinated in Europe and conducted as an EU-US collaboration. The CLEF 2000 and 2001 campaigns were sponsored by the DELOS Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries [5]. From October 2001, CLEF is being run as an independent project of the European Commission (IST-2000-31002). The consortium members are:
Typically, an information retrieval system evaluation campaign permits participating groups to compare the performance of their systems with respect to given tasks, under a set of controlled conditions: a reference document collection; a standard set of queries; assessment of the relevance of the ranked list of results submitted by each participating system; a comparative analysis of the results. When the evaluation is performed in a number of successive campaigns, the accumulated resources of data and assessed result sets become increasingly valuable for the participating research groups providing them with material for independent system testing and tuning. CLEF aims at making this test data also available to the wider R&D community
CLEF provides a series of evaluation tracks designed to test different aspects of information retrieval system development. The intention is to encourage systems to move from monolingual searching to the implementation of a full multilingual retrieval service.
Multilingual Information Retrieval: This is the main task in CLEF. It requires searching a multilingual collection of documents for relevant items, using a selected query language. This is a complex task, testing the capability of a system to handle a number of different languages simultaneously and to merge the results, ordering them according to relevance.
Bilingual Information Retrieval: In this track, any query language can be used to search just one of the CLEF target document collections. Many newcomers to cross-language system evaluation prefer to begin with the simpler bilingual task before moving on to tackle the more complex issues involved in truly multilingual retrieval.
Monolingual (non-English) Information Retrieval: Until recently, most IR system evaluation focused on English. However, many of the issues involved in IR are language dependent. CLEF provides the opportunity for monolingual system testing and tuning, and for building test suites in other European languages.
Domain-specific Mono- and Cross-Language Information Retrieval: The rationale for this task is to study CLIR on another type of collection, serving a different kind of information need. The information, which is provided by domain-specific documents, is far more targeted than news stories and contains much terminology. It is claimed that the users of this type of collection are typically interested in the completeness of results. This means that they are generally not satisfied with finding just some relevant documents in a collection that may contain much more. Developers of domain-specific cross-language retrieval systems need to be able to tune their systems to meet this requirement.
Interactive Cross-language Information Retrieval: An interactive track that focused on the document selection problem was experimented with success in CLEF 2001. The design of future interactive tracks will be determined on the basis of input from interested participants.
For each task, the participating systems construct their queries (automatically or manually) from a common set of statements of information needs (known as topics) and search for relevant documents in the collections provided, listing the results in a ranked list.
The main CLEF test collection is formed of sets of documents in different European languages but with common features (same genre and time period, comparable content); a single set of topics rendered in a number of languages; relevance judgments determining the set of relevant documents for each topic.
Multilingual Corpus: The document collection currently consists of nearly 1,000,000 documents in six languages – Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. It contains both newswires and national newspapers. The collection used for the multilingual task in 2001 contained documents in five of those languages (Dutch was excluded). Two target collections were used for the bilingual track in 2001. Participants could query sets of either English or Dutch newspaper documents, using their preferred topic language. Spanish and Dutch were introduced for the first time in CLEF 2001 for different reasons. Spanish was included because of its status as the fourth most widely spoken language in the world. Dutch was added not only to meet the demands of the considerable number of Dutch participants in CLEF (the largest group) but also because it provides a challenge for those who want to test the adaptability of their systems to a new, less well-known language. The domain-specific task uses a different collection: the GIRT database of approx. 80,000 German social science documents, which has controlled vocabularies for English-German and German-Russian. The interactive track used data (documents in French and English and results) from the CLEF 2000 campaign.
Topics: The participating groups derive their queries in their preferred language from a set of topics created to simulate user information needs. Following the TREC philosophy, each topic consists of three parts: a brief title statement; a one-sentence description; a more complex narrative specifying the relevance assessment criteria. The English version of a typical topic from CLEF 2001 is shown below:
Title: U.N./US Invasion Haiti
Description: Find documents on the invasion of Haiti by
U.N./US soldiers.
Narrative: Documents report both on the discussion about
the decision of the U.N. to send US troops into Haiti and on the
invasion itself. They also discuss the direct consequences.
The title contains the main keywords, the description is a “natural language” expression of the concept conveyed by the keywords, and the narrative adds additional syntax and semantics, stipulating the conditions for relevance assessment. The motivation behind these structured topics is to provide query “input” for all kinds of IR systems, ranging from simple keyword-based procedures to more sophisticated systems supporting morphological analyses, parsing, query expansion and so on. In the cross-language context, the transfer component must also be considered, whether dictionary or corpus-based, a fully-fledged MT system or other. Different query structures may be more appropriate for testing one or the other methodology.
For CLEF 2001, 50 such topics were developed on the basis of the contents of the multilingual collection and topic sets were produced in all six document languages. Additional topic sets were then created for Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Thai. Participants could thus choose to formulate their queries in any one of nine European or three Asian languages.
Results assessment: The number of documents in large test collections such as CLEF makes it impractical to judge every document for relevance. Instead, approximate recall figures are calculated by using pooling techniques. The results submitted by the participating groups are used to form a "pool" of documents for each topic and for each language by collecting the highly ranked documents from all the submissions. The assumption is that if a sufficient number of diverse systems contribute results to a pool, it is likely that a large percentage of all relevant documents will be included. All documents not included in the pool remain unjudged and are therefore assumed to be irrelevant. A main concern with such a pooling strategy is that if the number of not detected relevant documents is above a certain (low) threshold, the resulting test collection will be of limited future use in testing systems that did not contribute to the pool. A grossly incomplete pool would unfairly penalize such systems when calculating precision and recall measures. This pooling strategy was first adopted by TREC and has been subsequently employed by both NTCIR and CLEF. A number of studies have been made to test its validity [6], [7], [8], [9]. Relevance assessment of the documents in the pool is distributed over a number of different sites and performed in all cases by native speakers. The results are then analyzed centrally using recall and precision measures and run statistics are produced and distributed.
This activity has grown in popularity and complexity since its beginnings in 1997 when a bilingual track was offered at TREC. Participation in CLEF 2001 was up more than 50% from the previous year, with 34 groups submitting results in one or more of the 5 different tasks offered: 9 from N.America; 21 from Europe, and 4 from Asia. Runs were submitted for all five tasks and for all twelve topic languages. Twenty-one groups tried one of the cross-language tasks, while ten preferred to remain with the monolingual track. Only eight groups were brave enough to attempt the multilingual track (processing a document collection in five languages is certainly a challenging task) and it should be noted that just two of these were newcomers to CLEF. An additional three groups tackled the experimental interactive task.
The results of CLEF 2001 were reported at a Workshop in Darmstadt, Germany (immediately preceding ECDL2001 – the European Conference on Digital Libraries). Both traditional and innovative approaches to CLIR were presented, and different query expansion techniques were described. All kinds of source to target transfer mechanisms were employed, including both query and document translation. Commercial and in-house resources were used and included machine translation, dictionary and corpus-based methods. The search strategies used varied from traditional IR to a considerable employment of natural language processing techniques. Different groups focused on different aspects of the overall problem, ranging from the development of language-independent tools such as stemmers to much work on language-specific features like morphology and compounding. A number of groups compared different techniques in different runs in order to evaluate the effect of a given technique on performance. In particular, it was noticeable that many groups were testing systems that integrated more than one translation method, e.g. MT or bilingual dictionary look-up combined with a data extracted from a comparable of parallel corpora. Overall, the CLEF 2001 Workshop offered a very good picture of current issues and the approaches now being adopted in CLIR. Recent CLEF Proceedings provide an excellent overview of both the state-of-the-art and the latest experiments in this field [10,] [11], [12].
The organization of the CLEF 2002 campaign will be very similar to that of CLEF 2001. There will be five tracks:
There will be seven languages in the multilingual collection as Finnish documents have been added to the existing set of Dutch, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish newspaper and news agency texts. Topics will again be provided in a large number of languages, according to demand. The multilingual task will remain unchanged. The greatest change will be in the bilingual task. In an attempt to encourage work on European languages other than English, it will be possible to query any of the document collections bilingually, with the single exception of English. The only variation to this rule will regard newcomers; they will be given the option of choosing English as their target collection. The domain-specific task will be expanded with more use being made of the controlled vocabulary. The conditions of the interactive task are still to be decided.
More information will be available from the Clef Web site [13].
It remains to be seen how long it will be possible to continue CLEF. The current funding from the Commission covers the 2002 and 2003 campaigns. Our aim is to add more languages to the document collections and to include new tasks. We would like to cover not only the major European languages but also some representative samples of minority languages, including members from each major group: e.g. Germanic, Romance, Slavic, and Ugro-Finnic languages. We also hope to include tracks to evaluate CLIR systems working on media other than text. In particular, we are beginning to examine the feasibility of organizing a spoken CLIR track in which systems would have to process and match spoken queries in more than one language against a spoken document collection.
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Carol Peters
Researcher
IEI-CNR
Area di Ricerca CNR, Via Moruzzi, 1
56124 Pisa
Italy
Phone: +39 050 3152897
Fax: +39 050 3152810
Carol Peters is a researcher at the “Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione” an Institute of the Italian National Research Council in Pisa. Her current research interests are focused on the multilingual information access area. She has collaborated on numerous European Commission projects and is now working on the implementation of the multilingual interface for two digital library projects: ECHO - European CHronicles On-line - collections of historical film archives from four European countries, and SCHOLNET - a digital library to support virtual scholarly communities. She is also Coordinator of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (IST-2000-31002), a cross-language information retrieval system evaluation activity sponsored by the Information Science Technologies programme of the EC in collaboration with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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For citation purposes:
Peters, C. "Evaluating Cross-Language Systems the CLEF Way", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/clef/>
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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.
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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.
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:
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.
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.
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Annette Kelly
An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council,
53 & 54 Upper Mount St.
Dublin 2.
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
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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/>
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By Monika Segbert, Anna Maria Balogh, Rima Kupryte and Darius Cuplinskas - February 2002
The authors outline one of the major OSI Information Programme projects, the eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries Direct) project whose aim is to facilitate affordable access to electronic journals for libraries and their users in developing countries. Its main efforts are directed at negotiating acceptable deals with publishers while forming a multi-country consortium that will ensure sustainability.
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The CULTIVATE network fosters international co-operation. Its latest node, Cultivate Russia, demonstrates commitment to bridging the digital divide by encouraging knowledge transfer, networking and partnerships. These are the common denominators with the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, which - over 10 years - has addressed the issues concerning library modernisation in countries in transition, especially in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Its Networked Library Programme helped to alleviate the effect of the momentous political and economic changes in these countries, and the impact of globalisation of the electronic information market on libraries in countries in transition.
This paper outlines one of the major OSI Information Programme projects, the eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries Direct) project whose aim to facilitate affordable access to electronic journals for libraries and their users in developing countries. Its main efforts are directed at negotiating acceptable deals with publishers while forming a multi-country consortium that will ensure sustainability.
The paper also argues that potential but unexplored synergies exist between EC funded support actions – such as CECUP, TRIS [1] and PULMAN – and the eIFL network.
At the most fundamental, philosophical level, the concept of open society is based on the recognition that people act on imperfect knowledge and that no one is in possession of the ultimate truth. In practice, an open society is characterized by the rule of law; respect for human rights, minorities and minority opinions; the division of power; and a market economy. Broadly speaking, open society is a way to describe the positive aspects of democracy.
The term "open society" [2] was first proposed by French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) and developed further by the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) in his 1945 book Open Society and Its Enemies.
 |
| Karl Popper and George Soros discussing Open Societies |
The Open Society Institute, Budapest is a privately run, grant-making foundation that develops and implements a range of programs in civil society, culture, education, media, public health, and human and women's rights, as well as social, legal and economic reform. OSI Budapest is part of the Soros foundations network, an informal network of organizations established and supported by investor and philanthropist George Soros, and active in more than 50 countries world wide. Together with the New York-based Open Society Institute, OSI Budapest provides support and assistance to Soros foundations in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Guatemala, Haiti, Mongolia, and Southern and West Africa.
The OSI Information Program is based on three premises. Firstly, that human beings are not passive subjects or just economic agents seeking personal gain, but civic beings who share a world which they have the power to shape. Secondly, that the ability to exchange ideas, knowledge and information is the lifeblood of citizenship and participation in a shared public sphere. And thirdly, that while traditional media remain essential to citizenship, new digital technologies hold the potential for enhancing civic life that is still largely untapped. They also entail dangers that are not yet fully understood.
Knowledge is not sufficient to create open societies. But given adequate economic resources, and a serviceable legal and institutional environment, access to knowledge in all its forms is possibly the single most important factor in determining the success or failure of open society.
Over the past five years or so, the predecessors to the Information Program have done much to provide open access to knowledge and information in previously closed societies. The Internet Program has helped to introduce internet connectivity in more than 35 countries, and has been at the forefront of funding for internet policy for human rights and independent voices online. The Network Library Program has helped libraries transform themselves into truly public, service-oriented centers for their communities. The Center for Publishing Development aided publishers in post-communist countries in the transition to market-based publishing, supported several thousand translations of core books for education and public debate, and nurtured a new electronic publishing industry in the region.
OSI wanted to support a venture that targets traditionally “information-starved” countries - access to the widest possible range of information is obviously a major factor in fostering the development of open societies. The eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) [3] consortium provides a powerful structural solution to the ‘digital divide’ in content access. Much of the most useful online information is expensive and unaffordable to users in poorer countries. Most of the participating countries had very limited access in the past to the wealth of information available from international scholarly journals, especially in the social sciences and humanities. This was not just for political reasons but also because of the prohibitive cost to these libraries in obtaining even a small number of such journals in print format.
The project is based on leveraging two features of digital information. Firstly, the Internet network effect enables demand aggregation on a very large scale: a large consortium of individually poor consumers acquires significant negotiating power. Secondly, the marginal cost of digital data is zero, so that additional units of high-value digital commodities produced for affluent markets can be re-sold to less affluent markets at negligible cost to the producer, as long as the transaction cost to the producer is kept low.
In late 1999 OSI published a tender for access to electronic journals in social sciences and humanities, which, after independent evaluation, was won by the EBSCO Company. This initiative, called Electronic Information for Libraries Direct - eIFL Direct, makes information available electronically to libraries (academic, research, medical, public, national, and parliamentary), ministries, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Users include scholars, policy-makers, government officials, students and the general public. To date well over 3 million searches have been performed and this number is increasing dramatically by the day. Along with Guatemala and Haiti, 27 countries are from Central and Eastern Europe (mostly former Soviet satellites), and ten are from southern Africa. The project is currently expanding to Western African countries and Indonesia, as well as to other countries that have expressed interest.
The project was conceived and initiated centrally by OSI, but it became clear very quickly, that its sustainability hinged very much on maximum involvement of the stake-holders, e.g. those libraries who were expected to fund and promote the project from national sources and to local users. A key workshop in November 2000 brought many of the representatives of the participating countries together to discuss the best way to sustain the project. The logical conclusion of keeping in mind the two principal features of leveraging digital information, was to form national consortia, who would be responsible for fund-raising, training, marketing, and provide up-to-date feedback on the needs of its users for existing and future content. However, forming and running consortia requires a sophisticated level of management and co-operation, which many countries in the OSI network had not yet been able to acquire. Much of the effort of developing the eIFL project throughout 2001 was therefore devoted to helping the creation of national consortia, through meetings, grant schemes, training and the strategic advice of Task Forces representing the regions in the eIFL network.
Levering the combined purchasing power of many led to the decision to form the world’s biggest library consortium: EIFL.Net is an international consortium of library consortia that will lead, support, motivate, and advocate for the wide availability of information by library users in member countries in transition.
It will: (1) assist in the building of strong national consortia; (2) be the premier multi-country negotiator for securing affordable commercial electronic information services; (3) strongly advocate for the development of local digital resources; (4) provide a strong central business relationship with content providers; (5) leverage multi-national expertise and resources to expand the access to information; (6) provide top quality educational and consulting services; (7) be an advocate for the adoption and advancement of effective information distribution models; and, (8) develop model partnerships with global funding agencies, foundations, consortial groups, and content providers.
Its goals are to lead, encourage and support the building of national consortial agencies within each of the member countries; to provide libraries, through their national consortia, with expanded availability of electronic content through the highly effective acquisition, use and management of information resources; to provide member consortia with educational, consulting and marketing programs and services that are highly responsive to the needs of the membership; to act on behalf of national consortia and the libraries they represent to influence and change the evolving information environment and to effect the pricing models and technological standards and practices related to the use of and access to electronic information resources.
The eIFL project now encompasses more than 40 countries with a total population of about 800 million. The larger it is, the greater its negotiating power with suppliers. Of the 200 or so countries in the world, about 150 cannot afford broad, direct access to information resources of the kind EIFL is providing, and the project could in principle expand to encompass most of these countries. Already well over 2 000 institutions now take part in the eIFL project, who collectively have performed over 4 million searches, and the number continues to grow.
Training librarians involved in the eIFL project has – to no-ones real surprise – turned out to be one of the key factors of success. Currently a training programme is being designed that will strengthen the capacity to sustain the eIFL project and to take an active part in eIFL.Net. The overall aim of the training program is to ensure that all countries of the region have a clear understanding of the issues involved in the creation and operation of a library consortium. The initial and primary aim is to assist in the establishment and operation of consortia to make effective use of the eIFL databases, while keeping in mind that longer-term consortia for other purposes should be enabled. The success of this program will be measured by the extent to which the appropriate people in the relevant countries gain understanding and skills necessary for effective consortium operation.
In its initial iteration, the eIFL project is a West-to-South/East conduit for journals and databases in the social sciences, public policy, business and medicine. EBSCO, the provider chosen as a result of an international tender, through its databases offers access to more than 5000 journals in these subjects. This content base is now expanding to include science and technology journals, and richer resources for medicine and public health. OSI, in partnership with the World Health Organization (WHO) is already conducting a pilot called the Research Network Pilot in 9 sites in 8 countries. Five countries are in Africa and 3 in the eIFL consortium include Mongolia, Uzbekistan and Armenia. The information partners in the pilot include SilverPlatter, ISI and Elsevier. The goal is to rollout the project after the pilot has been evaluated to approximately 170 developing countries of the world.
A second function of the consortium will be to act as a conduit for lateral information exchange, facilitating East-East, South-South and South-East content flows. It will also be a platform for developing local digital content which feeds into the consortium. Third, the consortium could become a bulk buyer of low-cost hardware and software applications for its member institutions, and an infrastructure for delivering training. At a later stage, it could begin to function as a network for dissemination of policy knowledge and participation in national and global information policy formation.
OSI is also involved in strengthening the role of alternative publishers of electronic journals, such a, to name but one, the Public Library of Science. A recent meeting in Budapest brought the main players of high-quality but low-cost initiatives together to discuss how to bring about barrier-free access to scholarly publications.
Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the EC has taken many steps to encourage co-operation with the countries of Central and Eastern Europe – mostly with the so-called New Accession Countries, but also with the Russian Federation, and countries of the former Soviet Union. This engagement is acknowledged by George Soros, who is in the process of reducing his commitment to Central Europe, in favour of other countries in Africa and Asia which do not receive as much attention from Europe.
There are many projects supported by the European Union that can and could use the network created through the eIFL network to transfer knowledge and research results, enable closer networking with institutions in the EU, and aid capacity building pioneered in the 10 years of OSI operations in the region. Extending the CULTIVATE network eastwards to Russia in one such example, as is the PULMAN network for public libraries which includes countries in Eastern and Southern Europe. A recent OSI initiative as part of eIFL is to run a series of workshops on electronic licensing in the eIFL countries, following the model created in the EU CELIP project, and run by the then CELIP project manager. A new EC funded action, TRIS (see article in this issue of Cultivate Interactive) plans to actively foster the participation of relevant interest groups that may not otherwise be present in IST. This relates in particular to the participation of non-EU countries, mostly within the PHARE, TACIS and MEDA areas. Despite the availability of significant resources and the active promotion policies undertaken by the Commission, in fact, these areas have experienced difficulties in their involvement in European RTD activities. It is one of the working hypothesis of TRIS that the TRIALS format, because of its lightweight footprint and of its direct concern with results and technology transfer, may represent an optimal vehicle for the involvement of these countries and potentially a bridgehead for a low-risk inclusion of these areas into the 6th FP. And then, when we look ahead, we see other EC projects which will have increasing relevance for the development of Open Societies in the OSI countries, such as PSINet [4] a wide-ranging preparatory action under the European Commission's e-Content programme. It has been following up the 1999 Green Paper on Public Sector Information and supporting the overall aim to improve access to Europe's Public Sector Information (PSI).
Much has been done by OSI, especially through its networked library programme, and now within the activities of eIFL, to level the playing field for libraries and their users in disadvantaged communities around the world. Much remains to be done – lets do it all together.
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Monika Segbert MBE FLA (hon)
Project management and consultancy
info@monikasegbert.com
<http://www.monikasegbert.com/>
Anna Maria Balogh
eIFL Project Coordinator
abalogh@osi.hu
<http://www.eifl.net/>
Rima Kupryte
Manager, OSI Networked Library Programme
Darius Cuplinskas
Director, OSI Information Programme
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For citation purposes:
Segbert, M., Balogh, A., Kupryte, R. and Cuplinskas, D. "eIFL - Electronic Information for Libraries", Cultivate Interactive, issue
6, 11 February 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue6/eifl/>
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By Miloš Drdácký and Jan Válek - February 2002
Miloš Drdácký and Jan Válek report on ARCCHIP [1], a Centre of Excellence Project supported by the European Community. The project uses workshops as a way of exchanging knowledge, primarily on the complexity of problems of safeguarding cultural heritage including its social and economic aspects, documentation, interpretation, presentation, degradation and protection, between EU and CEE countries. ARCCHIP [1] facilitates new contacts, projects and networks.
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Civil engineering and architecture are the main fields of application for research results of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (ITAM) [2] of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. This tradition is now more than eighty years old, during this time increased attention has been paid to safeguarding the built heritage and its integration into the life of contemporary society. The complexity of problems of safeguarding cultural heritage calls for modern interdisciplinary approaches which have been implemented in a systematic way since 1995 by the foundation of a new department in the Institute – the Associated Research Centre for Historic Structures and Sites – joining together researchers from two institutes of the Academy of Sciences. The process has continued, because of success in grant project competitions and now even more scientists from other research institutes and universities are involved into this research. There are two research units, one in Prague and another in Telc. Since 2000, ITAM [2] has been supported by the EC 5th Research Framework as one of the Czech Centres of Excellence through ARCCHIP.
ARCCHIP programme [1] consists of five groups of work packages:
Workshops ARIADNE (Advanced Research Initiation Assisting and Developing Networks in Europe) are a week long working meetings for experts from the EU and ECC countries. The topics of these workshops are highly relevant to the needs of current cultural heritage requirements for their protection. Some previous and upcoming workshops include:
A01 Social and economic integration of cultural heritage April 23-29, 2001
A02 Cultural heritage in local and regional social and economic stability May 9-15, 2001
A03 Cultural heritage in urban areas June 11-17, 2001
A04 Vulnerability of cultural heritage to hazards and prevention measures Aug. 18-24, 2001
A05 Documentation, interpretation, presentation and publication of CH. September 1-7, 2001
A06 Degradation of cultural heritage in surrounding environment October 20-26, 2001
A07 Indoor climate and tourism effects November 12-18, 2001
A08 Biodegradation of cultural heritage December 10-16, 2001
A09 Historic materials and their diagnostics February 4-10, 2002
A10 New materials for safeguarding cultural heritage April 22-28, 2002
A11 Historic structures May 20-26, 2002
A12 New technologies for safeguarding cultural heritage June 1-7, 2002
The structure of the workshops is based on position papers of invited top specialists with the aim of elaborating on state of the art conclusions and to clearly formulating the most up-to-date problems in the area. These documents and profound discussions are utilised for establishment of core networks in the selected areas. These networks are established in order to enable continuous co-operation and mutual information on the topics under discussion and creation of a virtual international centre for cultural heritage research.
METEOR (Medium Term Educational Opportunity and Research) is a 2 week training course consisting of clusters of up-to-date problems provided by the Institute with support of leading experts from EU and CEE countries and is intended for participants mostly from CEE countries. The training sessions are completed with a possibility of 3 months stays for research students and researchers who can be housed by the Centre (ARCCHIP) and participate on its on-going research projects.
TACITUS programme (Twining Arrangements and Research with Co-operating Institutions and Universities) enables visits or stays for research students or researchers from the EU or CEE countries in any of the co-operating institutions.
The preferred research topics involve environmental effects on cultural heritage objects and diagnostics of their integrity damages (e.g. investigation of local failures and damages, monitoring, remote sensing and deterioration of structural integrity, warning systems, loading spectra from technological seismicity and tourism), planning and management tools for historic cities and territories (e.g. methodology of safeguarding planning for historic sites, documentation and information systems for small historic cities – GIS based, micro-regional concept of territorial and urban planning, ICT in spatial evaluation of historic cities), historic structures and materials under repeated loading (e.g. behaviour of historic carpentry timber joints of roof frameworks, fatigue behaviour of historic stones under repeated action of forces or restricted volumetric changes), survey of historic paintings by means of modern non-invasive methods (e.g. detection of delaminated parts of historic lime plasters by means of differential vibration sensitivity and/or thermal conductivity), new materials for conservation and methods for testing historic materials (e.g. small sampling techniques and testing of historic materials – namely mortar, stone and wood, mechanical characteristics of historic materials and influence of consolidation, fibre reinforced mortars for repair and safeguarding of art monuments), fibre plastics composite and net reinforcement for historic masonry.
PATRIMONIA, HESTIA and GOLEM are aimed to enlarge scope of results with a wide practical application
PATRIMONIA is aiming at the rise of cultural heritage awareness of people and understanding heritage protection as a part of total environmental protection. It is a project for youth which concentrates on cultural heritage in the relations between people, between mankind and nature and between people and technology as a message for and source of approaches to sustainable development.
HESTIA (Heritage for Economic and Social Stability and International Adhesion) is designed to prepare pilot programmes based on regional and micro-regional traditions, resources and technologies in order to ensure economic and social stability and sustainability of small historic cities.
GOLEM (Gradually Optimised Low Energy Materials for construction in the CEEC) is intended to prepare pilot programmes based on traditional eco-efficient technologies and to increase awareness of citizens to cultural heritage and create a basis for small regional industry.
Eight workshops A01-A08 from the aforementioned list were organized in 2001. At those workshops 58 scientists participated from 16 EC countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom), 58 scientists from 13 Associated countries (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia) and 5 researchers from 4 Mediterranean countries (Bosnia Herzegovina, Israel, Tunisia, Turkey).
During the workshops, there emerged many common themes for further research in the field of cultural heritage, which are of a great relevance to all European countries and which have a high importance and strong impact on European economic and social development and stability. In conclusion despite of some national research funding in individual European countries, many problems are to be solved effectively and competently only through international co-operation.
The workshops as well as being an opportunity for active participation of the ARCCHIP Director at several international events were therefore oriented towards future development of the European Research Area and the scientific activities in the field of cultural heritage. As an example, the declaration from the first workshop, which was sent to representatives of the EU Parliament, is presented here:
“As participants in the ARCCHIP workshop [1], held in the Czech Republic during April 2001, we would like to make representations about the Draft 6th Framework Programme. The workshop in Prague brought together representatives from 15 European countries, including 7 associated countries. The purpose of the workshop was to discuss the possibilities for research into the cultural heritage under the current 5th Framework document, particularly the topic of economic and social benefits of cultural heritage. The workshop has demonstrated that this topic is of very great relevance to Europe. Understanding of cultural heritage is central to European identity.
Having noticed that the draft of the forthcoming 6th Framework Programme document does not mention cultural heritage, we are afraid that research into the cultural heritage will be discontinued. Without such research, all of us will lose an opportunity to strengthen European unity.
Therefore, we would like to recommend that the forthcoming 6th Framework Programme includes:
The contents and priorities of the new 6th Framework Programme are extremely important for CEE countries which are mostly building their new research orientation and therefore the inclusion of cultural heritage issues into the 6th Framework has a very strong stimulating role. On the other hand, its unclear position may cause catastrophic consequences in national research policies of some CEE countries where the European approach will be reflected.
The experience from our first eight workshops confirms that mutual exchange of knowledge between EU and CEE countries helps substantially to discover potentials for future collaboration and encourages formulation of new joint projects. The workshops initiated twelve new proposals for the 5th Framework Programme autumn calls. The professional variety of the invited participants which extended from universities, state supported research institutions to private sector representatives has proved to be very constructive as it condensed in a balanced identification of future scientific problems oriented to basic and applied research.
The ARCCHIP Centre has recently been asked to start retaining contacts, and so we are building our own database and information system and maintaining our Web site [1], with as much actual data as possible. This database aims to become a key source of information for networking arrangements between the EU and CEE countries in the field of Cultural Heritage. The state of the art reports that have resulted from the ARCCHIP programme are published there.
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Dr. Miloš Drdácký
Director of ITAM and ARCCHIP
ITAM, Czech Academy of Sciences
Prosecka 76, 190 00
Praha 9, The Czech Republic
Miloš F. Drdácký (1945) is the director of the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, where he has been working for 34 years. He has been engaged as an external reader in several Czech Universities since 1975, Head of the Town Architect Office in the World Heritage City Telc (1993-1998). His research activities include theory of structures, experimental mechanics and testing, performance of historic structures and materials, safeguarding plans and management of historic sites including risk analysis (tourism, neglecting maintenance, degradation, inappropriate conservation etc.). Results are published in more than 200 publications and research reports and he edited 15 books or International Conference Proceedings
Dr. Jan Válek
Head of Associated Research Centre for Historic Structures and
Sites
ITAM, Czech Academy of Sciences
Prosecka 76, 190 00
Praha 9, The Czech Republic
Jan Válek (1970) graduated in Building Construction and Architecture at Czech Technical University in Prague. Following his PhD research he collaborated on several projects including preparation and co-writing a review of the scientific, technical and conservation literature on ‘Mortars in Historic Buildings’ commissioned by Historic Scotland. His expertise covers conservation of stone masonry, compatibility of historic and modern materials, and assessment of degradation connected with conservation of built heritage.