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

Cultivate Interactive Issue 7: Editorial

Welcome to the seventh issue of Cultivate Interactive.

Historians of the future will look back upon the First Information Age of the 20th. and 21st.Centuries, and apart from arguing over the nomenclature, they will also be amazed: not only by the difficulties it had in reaching common standards of operation but also by the period's attempts to gather information from so many and seemingly disparate sources. If they ever alight upon this issue 7 of Cultivate Interactive, I feel sure they will be impressed by the effort and energy of the professionals in the DIGICULT projects and elsewhere in achieving their goals.

Those same historians, on reading the article on the ARTISTE Project, would begin to appreciate the enormous wealth of imagery already available to users, but users with no organised means of searching for what they needed. However the ARTISTE Project had produced a means of searching quickly through tens of thousands of images distributed across 4 databases each with a different metadata schema. This enormous wealth of pre-digital collections of multimedia posed the Age with another type of problem: preservation. At the turn of the 20th. Century, broadcasting organisations were confronted with large quantities of culturally vital material endangered either by damage beyond repair through ageing or rendered inaccessible by the rapid redundancy of the format in which they had initially been recorded. The PRESTO Project article will give a clear exposition of the preservation problems and the cost-effective solutions PRESTO was producing. (Additionally the issue carries a report on the Multimedia Archive Preservation Workshop held in London in May 2002).

Not that the professionals of the DIGICULT Programme were just concerned with collation and preservation of modern media, as the Kalliope article can testify. This project set about creating an on-line union catalogue of the manuscripts and letters of not just the famous but ordinary unremarked people of by-gone ages. Moreover, it was the less well-known who formed part of the raison d'être of the COINE Project which placed emphasis upon the inclusion of material from communities relatively unversed in the technology of the Internet, but which nonetheless had something valuable to say. By making access to distributed material much simpler for ordinary users and by providing them with a platform for their own writings, COINE was seeking to turn passive users into active contributors. Achieving a better understanding of those users was a key issue for representatives of various cultural content programmes world-wide when they gathered in Washington D.C. to discuss movement Towards a digital Cultural Content Forum. Globalisation was well underway by then, but this meeting, as the article stated, "emphasised some of the very real differences in approach across the jurisdictions represented, ..".

Those historians of the future will, of course, have ample proof of the major headache that achieving common standards represented. However, another article in Cultivate Interactive 7 from the COVAX Project demonstrated the progress made in moving libraries, museums and archives into a European Information Environment through the adoption of XML-based networking of their collections. The article on PULMAN described the Project's work on common technical standards and other support for public libraries, museums and archives.

However, the historians of the future ought to be interested in an article Challenges for a Semantic Web which stood back for a while from the competing pressures of different technological approaches in order to consider the existing strategies for a semantic web and to examine the benefits of a different method. In his article Kim Veltman pointed out some possible dangers, even one spine-chilling one, and reminded his readers that, once again, we should not lose sight of the less well-known communities on a sub-national level and the enormous cultural diversity they still represented in the 21st.Century, something that needed to be properly reflected in the evolving semantic web.

An article from the TOURBOT Project might have appeared, at first, to resolve a question posed by the introspective observers of the 1950's who predicted that robots might assume a dominant role in our lives. Indeed there was Tourbot conducting visitors around exhibitions. But those observers had not reckoned with the Internet, nor therefore Tourbot's capacity to accept tasks set by visitors many miles distant from its workplace. The article on the VALHALLA Project showed another mixture of ancient and modern in the way that two beautiful and long-established gardens, once the property of political rivals, were now using modern technology, including Virtual Reality Modelling to document themselves and safeguard their futures. So if the robots of 2002 did not appear to pre-dominate as was once feared, the article on the SciX Project nonetheless demonstrated that there were indeed disruptive technologies around and that in the case of electronic scientific publishing, not all had necessarily turned out for the best of all possible worlds, (with apologies to Voltaire).

Finally, from its "At the Event" reports and articles such as WebWatching National Node Web Sites, and the Praxis section on RSS, it will be possible for those historians to see how the First Information Age evolved. Furthermore, I hope they will sense the gratitude of this new editor towards all the contributors to this issue and not least to my colleagues at UKOLN, Marieke Guy (née Napier), Philip Hunter, Shirley Keane and Brian Kelly for their unstinting advice and support.

Richard Waller (Editor)

Date of Page: 11 July 2002

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