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| Issue 7 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Christine Michaut - July 2002
This section aims to provide news of the European Commission's initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content. Its objectives are to pinpoint the latest developments in programmes, projects and activities and to give a clear picture of progress in the area since the last issue. It certainly does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of what the EC is doing in the area but rather a short summary of some of the key items. The content is based largely on the information provided in the eCulture Newsletter [1], published by the European Commission, DG Information Society, Cultural Heritage Applications Unit [2].
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Since the last column in February, a number of important conferences have taken place, two of which we would like to highlight:
This conference, which was supported by the EVAN (Electronic Imaging and The Visual Arts Networking) European Project, was preceded by two days of training activities and Workshops [3].
The main EVA Conference saw the presentation of 55 papers and two important special sessions: one devoted to the 6th Framework Programme plans of the European Commission (2003-2006), presented by Bernard Smith. The other, organised by TRIS, was given over to the presentation of 17 Projects (TRIALS) launched as a result of the 4th IST Programme of the European Commission in 2000.
Several outcomes from the EVA 2002 Florence conference were forthcoming:
This conference was held within the framework provided by the Lund Action Plan. The Lund Principles [4] cover the tasks needed to co-ordinate Member State digitisation programmes. The associated action plan requires the establishment of a National Representative Group (NRG)[5]. This group is formed by representatives and experts nominated by Member States, in many cases from national cultural institutions or Ministries of Culture. The National Representative Group has Terms of Reference [6] and meets every 6 months under each Council Presidency. The first meeting took place under the Belgian Presidency, and this mission report covered the second meeting hosted by the Spanish Presidency.
The actual NRG meeting took place on the 16th May 2002. The agenda covered:
The meeting on 17th May 2002 was given over to presentations on good practice in Member States (based upon a request by the Spanish Presidency to the NRG group). Spain, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, France, Germany, UK, and Italy nominated more than 40 best practice projects and made short presentations during the day.
Following these presentations a statement was made by the future Danish Presidency. They indicated continuing support for the work of the NRG and also for the issues of quality (leader Belgium) and long-term digital preservation, (leader Spain with the Council Resolution). The session continued with a more detailed presentation by the Spanish CAC representative on the new Council Resolution on Long-term Digital Preservation.
The next NRG meeting mill take place in Copenhagen on 10-11 December 2002 under the Danish Presidency.
The essential issues were:
The new network MINERVA presented its different objectives and practical tasks. The meeting's conclusions mentioned priorities both for the NRG and MINERVA partners. MINERVA will compile examples of good and best practice into a document for circulation.
The Spanish Presidency presented the Council Resolution on long-term digital preservation. Its cultural priorities had been:
The last point concerns the influence that cultural policies and related activity brings to bear upon other policies of the EU; (to date cultural policies have more been subject to the impact of other EU policies). The need for a "European Cultural Space" was introduced.
Luis Alberto de Cuenca, the Spanish Secretary of State for Culture, concluded that there was a new spirit of cooperation between Member States on digitisation, and that Spain had many excellent on-going projects and was well placed in the EU context. He congratulated all the participants on making the event a success of the Spanish Presidency. His closing speech was followed by a press conference, resulting in several articles being published in Spanish newspapers.
Overall the meeting the meeting proved invaluable in terms of its technical content and its high standards of organisation by the Spanish Presidency were appreciated. The facilities provided by Alicante University were outstanding.
Negotiations are currently ongoing for 7 projects along 3 different action lines:
For "Preparing for future research activities", two Thematic Networks are being set up, "e-Culturnet" and "Orion", and one Accompanying measure, called "First".
Under Action line "Network of excellence and working groups" three projects will probably been taken up -"Pulman", "ART-E-FACT" and "Musicnetwork" (see below), whereas there is only one negotiation under way for "Enabling RTD co-operation with newly associated States" (working title "HEREIN2E")
More detailed information will be available on the CORDIS projects pages [7] as soon as the contracts are finalised.
One of the interesting new projects to emerge from the 8th call is MUSICNETWORK, a network of excellence on music interests across Europe. The main objective is to bring European music industries and content providers together in order to promote interactive multimedia. Special attention will be devoted to interactive coded music - standards, representation, distribution, protection, imaging conversion, etc. The user community will include publishers, multimedia distributors, music shops, schools, music conservatoires, individual consumers and software developers. The project will of course be undertaking state-of-the-art analyses of the technical and content-related aspects. Account will be taken of earlier project work in the field, drawing on the experience of HARMONICA, WEDELMUSIC, MIRACLE and CANTATE. Work is expected to begin in June. Coordination will be by University of Florence DSI, [8].
On 15th May 2002, the European Parliament approved the Council's common position on the Sixth Research Framework Programme to run to 2006 with a budget of some €17.5bn, together with some 34 compromise amendments.
As the new Community Framework (FP6) for research and development introduces important shifts in the approach to EU-funded research, both in terms of content and instruments, the IST programme is organising a series of open workshops in May 2002 [9]. The objectives are to present to the research community the concepts and the details of implementation of IST in FP6, including the new funding instruments and to provide support for partnership building.
The IST priority in FP 6 is an important part of the specific programme on Integrating and Strengthening the European Research Area.
There is further information on the new Framework Programme [10].
The main purpose of IST 2002 [11] is to help build the European Research Area for the Information Society within the EU's Sixth Framework Programme for Research and Development (FP6), which is to be launched at the end of 2002.
To be held in Copenhagen on 4-6 November, IST 2002 will broaden its scope to everyone with a strategic interest in Information Society research, whether at European, national or regional level - or even entirely within the private sector. The general theme is 'Partnerships'. The aim is to help Europe's researchers and industrialists build networks for collaborative IST research, at a time when the IST priority within the EU's 6th Framework Programme for research and technological development is getting underway.
The 68th IFLA General Conference and Council [12]will be hold from August 18th to 24th 2002 in Glasgow. This year's focus will be on Libraries for Life: Democracy, Diversity, and Delivery.
DigiCULT will have its own stand on the IFLA 2002 exhibition and over 20 of our funded projects will participate and present their activities. Volume 3 Issue 3 of our eCulture newsletter will have a special supplement on our participation in this exhibition.
In this issue we would like to draw your attention to our "Heritage for All" Key action line, which is funding projects that aim to reinforce Community Memory.
"Heritage for All" was the theme of KA III.1 .2, one of the two cultural heritage action lines in the 6th call for proposals launched in January 2001 within the context of the Information Society Technologies programme, under the Fifth Framework Programme.
In line with the objectives of the eEurope initiative, to provide content for all and ensure digital inclusion, "Heritage for All" aimed to "foster sustainable online communities by creating and documenting the digital record of their societies, including safeguarding its accessibility for the future''; in other words, to provide a context for documenting, sharing, accessing and preserving community heritage and collective memory in digital form. Conceived to encourage participation by smaller scale cultural and memory institutions, as well as to initiate citizen-, rather than technology-driven projects, this action line focused on the enhancement of local and regional cultural resources by developing digital archives to document past and present social history and cultural expression for the use of the widest possible range of individuals and groups of citizens. In this context, projects were selected which encouraged, to a greater or lesser extent, active participation of diverse on-line citizen communities in producing an evolving digital record of their culture.
CHIMER, CIPHER , COINE and MEMORIAL, the four projects that make up the "Heritage for All" cluster, are each of 30 months' duration. In some cases, preliminary results will start to emerge towards the end of this year. The first three of these projects all seek to address the personal views and interests of ordinary people in order to build a living image of regional heritage across Europe. MEMORIAL focuses on developing a methodology for digitising content of a very specific nature and making it available to the general public.
MEMORIAL [13] deals with a dark side of our recent history, the Holocaust, and focuses on data documenting former Nazi concentration camp prisoners in order to create a digital personal records archive on the Web. The project aims to increase awareness of, and facilitate access to relevant historical information for the general public, while simultaneously providing an invaluable and dedicated data resource for the use of special-interest groups, for example relatives of victims researching their family history.
Research work in support of the virtual MEMORIAL archive will provide a new technical approach, based on OCR (Optical Character Reading) techniques, which will be more generally applicable to a wide variety of paper documents in libraries, archives, museums or public record offices.
The MEMORIAL partnership brings together OCR and digital archiving experts from Germany, Israel, Poland and the UK. They combine to develop an innovative methodology and achieve optimum digitisation results, most notably, higher resolutions based on new imaging technologies. These technologies will tackle traditional problems, such as the poor quality of faint carbon copies, which are the main source of prisoner records, the inclusion of hand-written comments and rubber stamps and the presentation of data in columns of various types depending on the source. In addition, MEMORIAL makes use of technology methods capable of addressing problems of another nature, such as content-resolution problems, which are, for instance, due to variations in family and place names (e.g. in Polish, Russian, Italian).
The strong technical component of the project is crucial in terms of the application and development of technologies within the MEMORIAL context could be widely applied in digitising other kinds of paper-based documents, thus making use of new types of content.
CHIMER [14] sets out to capitalise on the natural enthusiasm and interests of children in developing new approaches to the use of evolving technologies for documenting items of cultural interest in their local communities. To achieve that, CHIMER will establish an international network of educational and cultural institutions, which, supported by technical partners, will work towards enhancing children's interaction with technology, so as to enable them to create on-line cultural content.
More specifically, twelve-year-old children in different parts of Europe will follow the guidance of museologists and teachers in building digital maps combining geographical coordinates detected using GPS devices with the creative use of mobile technologies and digital cameras. In this way, children from Bohemia to La Coruña and from the Netherlands to Lithuania will combine drawings and photographic images with their own comments on items of interest. Little by little they will participate in creating a digital archive of their own towns, villages and surrounding communities, which should enhance interest in the region, not only for children but also for other age groups.
CHIMER hopes to offer a model which can later be replicated on other networks, not only in the area of culture but also, for example, for public sector information, health and tourism, based on the use of digital cartography linked to multimedia databases.
The creation of a user-friendly web based environment which will enable ordinary citizens to record, present and share their personal and local cultural heritage, lies at the heart of the COINE project [15]. Partners work together to develop a toolkit of software tools and techniques for digitising, creating and maintaining multimedia resources which are brought together to build up a coherent cultural domain exploitable by individuals and small groups.
The overall aim of the project is to provide ordinary citizens or groups of citizens with software, which can support them in documenting and sharing their cultural interests, as well as exploring their local heritage. People of varying IT competence, age, social and educational background will be engaged in creating, managing and making available cultural content of the utmost importance to them personally. Practical examples of the usability of the COINE system by local communities in Greece, Spain, Poland and Ireland are:
Aiming to promote and preserve a living view of regional heritage across Europe, CIPHER [16] is committed to providing methods and tools that enable individuals and groups of people to document their reactions and experiences from interacting with their local heritage. Research work will focus on the construction and maintenance of four Cultural Heritage Forums, four on-line thematic collections of various heritage items, (archaeological material, historical documents, monuments, music, oral history, etc.), intended to trigger visitor participation and encourage active interpretation of heritage. Provided by a network of cultural institutions, the content of each forum highlights the distinct cultural identity of a European region that may transcend country borders. Forum themes include "Irish Cultural and Natural Heritage", "Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts", the "Shared Heritage of Central Europe" and the "Tradition of Technology Innovation in South Central England". Members of local communities are encouraged to explore, research and, more importantly, contribute creatively to content building for these cultural domains. Innovative tools for story construction supported by visualisation and virtual world technologies allow users to weave their own narratives and forge new associations across digital artefacts.
By developing dynamic, user-centred applications that serve as focal points for regional communities to interact with their local heritage, the CIPHER project seeks to support ordinary people in creating personalised content in order to share their group experiences and history.
And here is some news on internal issues: Behind us lies quite a long period of global restructuring of the IST Web pages. During this time, not being able to implement any changes or updates on our pages, we did our best to keep you informed via our newsletter eCulture. But since 24th May, the new system is online and we are busy updating our pages. If you should still happen to find - for a hopefully very short period - incomplete or outdated information while searching on DigiCULT, please feel free to contact us [17].
Finally, we would like to add that the work in the Information and Communication field in our Unit is now done by Christine Michaut who has succeeded to the post formerly held by Concha Fernandez de la Puente.
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Christine Michaut
Information & Communication Officer
Digital Heritage & Cultural Content Unit
With the assistance of the Cultural Applications team http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/whoswho.htm
in Luxembourg.
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For citation purposes:
Michaut, C. "DIGICULT Column", Cultivate Interactive, issue
7, 11 July 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/digicult/>
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