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By Daniel Weiss-November 2002
Daniel Weiss writes for us on the CHIMER Project which is aiming at establishing the European Cultural Heritage Archive on an open platform and retrieving local heritage from 6 partner countries.
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CHIMER [1] aims to deliver fully multimedia information not only via Web portals but also via mobile portals offering location-based services. The project aims to establish the European Cultural Heritage Archive based on an open platform. The project will combine available Internet, GPS (Global Positioning System), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), WI-FI (Wireless Fidelity) and GIS (Geographic Information Systems) technologies in order to develop interfacing and user access tools adapted to evolving 3G (Third Generation) networked multimedia technology for retrieving local heritage from 6 partner countries. CHIMER aims to offer a model which in the future can be replicated in other networks, not only in the area of cultural information but also, for example, for public sector information, health and cultural tourism, based on the use of digital vector cartography linked to multimedia databases.
The project combines not only partners from many different countries (Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Holland, Lithuania and Spain) but also partners with very different expertise. Hence we are now seeing co-operation, for example, between technical experts, researchers in museums and teachers in primary schools. The scientific and general information provided by museum experts and teachers will be complemented by the children's own interpretation. The CHIMER Project is supporting the natural creativity and curiosity of children by encouraging them to explore new tools for creating digital content.
The Chimer Project is developing and implementing applications for Mobile Technologies in a cultural heritage environment based on a combination of GPS and GIS technologies. A GIS platform serving multimedia information to multiple hand-held devices is being implemented. Device Portability is a key point in the CHIMER Project.
The information can be retrieved through any Pocket Pc, Tablet PC and the new generation of Ericsson/Samsung/Nokia 60 series of Java-based mobile phones. Video, audio, photos, vector maps, routes for GPS or Arc Pad Pocket PC shape files, and satellite images can be retrieved.
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Some standard scenarios could be:
You also get a menu choice where services based in real time territorial analysis can provide you with further information on, for example, restaurants, hospitals or leisure areas.
This application focuses on Cultural Tourism as a sustainable development based on cultural heritage. It works with Pocket Pc applications where GPS software such Ozi-Explorer can be used, or you can download the map and the routes into other applications.
Hot Spots for WI-FI applications are being deployed in the CRA Nosa Sra do Faro School (Ponteceso-Spain) and at the Headquarter of Project Coordinator, Stiching Bedrijfsregio Kop van Noord-Holland (Den Helder Netherland) as a wireless testing point emulating 3G using a 2 Megs ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line). Routes for GPS are also available if you want to navigate through the territory. They can be downloaded from the GIS server or requested via MMS.
The series of vector maps are going to be used in a wide range of services and applications such as tourism, health and in an environmental context to indicate natural disasters, new routes or trekking trails. The vector maps are not raster images and therefore can be modified in real time when retrieved from the GIS server. Children and scientific museum experts are creating the information content. School Teachers from 5 countries involved in the project are developing a cognitive methodology for introducing mobile learning in their schools. A part of their school curriculum has been already adapted to incorporate mobile learning. 14 partners from 6 different countries are involved in this project.
Detailed below are the major challenges that the project will seek to address.
For children and teachers the chief challenge is mobile cognitive issues; 5 schools around Europe are currently engaged in research. A multidisciplinary approach is being implemented. The five organisations involved are: Groene Poolster [2], CRA Nosa Sra do FARO [3] , Friderico Francisceum Gymnasium Bad Doberan [4], Elementary School in Chanovice [5]and Vilnius Minties Secondary School [6].
Besides the map and the information is an open platform enhancing the competence of children in the use of leading technology and communication systems in order to create, search and modify networked information resources. They will also be able to share, explore and exploit their local cultural heritage with children from other European countries.
There will be a need for:
The partners are grouped by their expertise in Table 1 below. Partner information is available at the Project Website [1].
| Cognitive methodology developer | Content providers and end users | E-applications developers | Mobile applications developers | Testing and evaluating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Groene Poolster(Den Helder, Holland) | Stiching Bedrijfsregio Kop van Noord-Holland(Den Helder, Holland) | Zentrum für Graphische Datenverarbeitung e.V. (D)Rostock (Germany) | Institute For Advanced Management Systems Research/ Abo Akademi University (FIN) | The State Research Institute of Applied Mathematics and Informatics (Vilnius, Lithuania) |
| CRA Nosa Sra do Faro (Ponteceso, Spain) | Friderico Francisceum Gymnasium Bad Doberan (Germany) | Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Rostock (Germany) | Vilnius Minties Secondary School (Vilnius, Lithuania) | |
| Friderico Francisceum Gymnasium Bad Doberan (Germany) | MUDIMA (Mazaricos-Spain) | CIBERESPACIO SL A Coruña (Spain) | ||
| Elementary School in Chanovice (Czech Republic) | KLATOVY MUSEUM (Klatovy, Czech Republic) | CROSS-CZECH (Czech Republic) |
The architecture has to integrate different layers of information and be workable through mutilple APIs & GUI in mobile devices where portability for delivering location based services to users with different profile is a key feature.
There is a GIS server in the background and that server is sending out information to the E-guide and M-guide based on requests (with UTM coordinates).
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| Figure 1: The CHIMER IT Architecture |
Both the clients, E-Guide (electronic guide) and M-Guide (mobile guide) will communicate with the server by sending a request.
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| Figure 2: Location Information-Based Services |
A request could, for instance, might be: "Send me the video with id(512)". The server receives the request and starts processing it. When the server is done, it will send back the result of the processing as a Response. The client receives the Response and can provide the GUI with the result. The benefit of using a Request/Response protocol is that it is very easy to add or remove functionality. When a new feature needs to be added, a new Request and Response pair is all that is needed. The new pair will not interfere with existing functionality.
The communication between the E-Map application and the prototype uses a specially designed XML protocol. The protocol can easily be extended when new features are implemented.
The best way of providing reusable components is to divide the client code into a GUI layer and a business model layer. The GUI layer should only contain information and methods for presenting the data received from the business model. The business model, on the other hand, should only know about the data available and function independently of any GUI issues. When the layers are clearly defined according to these guidelines, all the work of the business model layer can be used by both the E-Guide and the M-Guide.
The CHIMER Project will deliver:
Figure 1 Diagram kindly provided by: Stefan Hassinger of Zentrum für Graphische Datenverarbeitung e.V., Rostock, Germany.
Information for the section "Request and response communication to Mobile devices" was kindly provided by Svante Olofsson of IAMSR, ABO AKADEMI, Abo, Finland.
Photos provided by the Chimer Coordinator [7].
Information for completing this article was kindly provided by the Czech CHIMER partner Cross Czech-Romana Krizova.
Daniel Weiss
Director of Ciberespacio SL
Penarredonda 50
15170 A Coruña
Spain
URL: <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/paulm/>
Email: dweiss@chimer.org
Phone: +34 609 838 394
Daniel Weiss has been coordinating different European projects since 1990. These include ESF (Workshop of New Technologies, City of Madrid), Raphael (Blen Project) and RECITE II (The Networked City). He is Technical Coordinator for the CHIMER Project.
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For citation purposes:
Weiss, D. "CHIMER: Children's Heritage Interactive Models for Evolving Repositories", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/chimer/>
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By Paul Mulholland, Zdenek Zdrahal and Trevor Collins -November 2002
Paul Mulholland, Zdenek Zdrahal and Trevor Collins report on CIPHER, a new project aimed at developing sustainable cultural heritage forums to celebrate national and regional heritage across Europe.
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The growth of mass communications including the internet has accelerated the trend toward globalisation, which is viewed by some as leading to the loss of regional identity, culture and heritage. Similarly, within the commercial sector, globalisation can be seen to fuel the dominance of international brands insensitive to regional culture. Conversely, new technology can be used to help different cultures to co-exist and learn from each other, and can also be taken as an opportunity for regional cultural commerce to be widely promoted. Within this context, the CIPHER project aims to develop innovative technologies and methodologies that enable the celebration and exploration of national and regional heritage on a global scale.
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CIPHER is a two and a half year project funded by the European Commission under the theme 'Heritage for All' that started in April 2002. Six project partners are involved; The Open University in the UK, the Dublin Institute of Technology and The Discovery Programme, both based in Ireland, the University of Art and Design Helsinki in Finland, the Czech Technical University, and Regionales Information System (RiS) GmbH in Austria. Further information on the progress of the CIPHER project is available on the main CIPHER website [1].
A great deal of work needs to be done before technologies and methodologies can be provided that allow heritage regions and institutions to promote themselves on a global scale. Specific areas in need of attention are: the articulation of sustainable business models, the development of methods for enthusing and involving communities of interest, and the demonstration of clear benefits for the associated regions. We believe these problems can be addressed though the development of Cultural Heritage Forums associated to regions, that empower communities to create, own and sustain online cultural content for themselves, through the provision of workable methodologies and tools for long-term development and sustainability. The objective of the CIPHER project is therefore to develop the methodology and technology required to realise sustainable Cultural Heritage (CH) Forums that empower communities of interest to explore, research and build content.
Within the CIPHER project, a Cultural Heritage (CH) Forum is defined as an online space where people can participate and learn through accessing and contributing to a range of heritage resources around some theme. Users of the CH Forum are therefore engaged as active participants rather than passive viewers. CH Forums have an associated region. Within CIPHER, a region is defined as an area of distinct cultural identity, which may traverse country borders. Cultural Heritage Forums aim to widen access, but also promote rather than replace the experience of exploring regions and their heritage institutions. The approach to sustainability requires the engagement and involvement of interested communities, and associations with heritage of the physical world. The CIPHER model of sustainability comprises three aspects: technical, financial and content-related. Technical sustainability can be achieved by an architectural approach, whereby encoded content will be able to describe its methods of decoding, even where delivery and presentation technologies have since evolved. Development also conforms to an extensible open architecture model. Content sustainability can be achieved by close associations between the forum and communities and organisations that have closely mirrored interests, and reap significant benefit from actively using and promoting the forum. Recent experiences of the e-commerce sector unequivocally demonstrate that advertising revenue alone cannot form the basis of financial sustainability - sustainability requires a core group of public and private organisations and communities that adopt the CH Forum and benefit from its success.
From a technical perspective, this project focuses on the development of the CIPHER toolkit, providing support for CH Forum construction, maintenance, and crucially, the provision of active, engaging experiences for visitors. Support will be provided for constructing "dynamic narratives" - adaptive stories that can be relayed in individualised ways according to selected narrative structures and visitor preferences, to deliver personalised, engaging experiences. Visitors will also be empowered to investigate and research the contents of the CH Forum, producing their own personal spaces, and shared spaces owned by emerging communities of interest. Individual and collaborative construction will be supported by traditional and modern narrative conventions and structures that can help frame their research activities drawing an important link between heritage investigation and causal plot construction. Tools for story construction will be supported by innovative, user friendly, self-organising visualisation tools that provide new methods for navigating the forum, to support not just the location of resources but the construction of new paths and associations, that can then be shared with others. The approach aims to provide universal access to citizens, whereby IT competence, knowledge of languages and chosen computing platform need not prohibit access and use of a CH Forum.
The application goal of the project is to realise the CIPHER methodology and technology in the development of four CH Forums, that act as test cases throughout the life of the project. These test cases will be used by a large number of additional heritage communities and organisations outside the original CIPHER consortium, and will be sustained in the long term as examples of what the CIPHER tools and methodology can deliver. The four CH Forums together constitute the CH Forum Club. The four test cases are:
1) Irish Cultural and Natural Heritage. This CH Forum will primarily use information from a large database of Irish archaeology held digitally by the Discovery Programme.
2) Nordic Heritage through Storytelling and Historical Artefacts. A CH Forum built around the narratives represented in the Carta Marina, 1539.
3) Shared Heritage of Central Europe. This CH Forum will provide online access to a large volume of data concerning historical sites in the Czech Republic and Austria.
4) Tradition of technology innovation in South Central England. This CH Forum will build on the historical record of the cryptanalysis work done at Bletchley Park, home of Collossus, the World's first programmable computer.
A core technical innovation within the CH Forums will be the development of narrative tools to support the exploration of available content, and also allow visitors to create their own personal and shared stories and collections. Narrative concepts are proposed as an approach because heritage collections and presentations can be understood from a narrative perspective, and narrative theory can motivate the development of presentations and collections that are coherent, engaging and educational.
We define narrative as the particular way in which a story is told. A story is a conceptual space representing events, people and objects. A story may be told in a number of ways, to create different effects, such as humour or surprise. Any of these specific ways in which a story is told are narratives. This follows the definition of story and narrative provided by Brooks [2].
Specific narratives conform to different structural patterns, in order to emphasise different aspects of the story or put over a specific message. Schank [3] identifies a range of patterns that he terms 'story skeletons' that can be used to construct a particular narrative from a story. These patterns describe the conceptual associations made by the narrative and the order in which they are made. Schank claims that these story skeletons are categorised in terms of the gist of the story that they can relate such as 'avenging a wrongdoing', rather than purely in terms of the narrative structure. A narrative that relates a series of events generally has a plot. As described in Murray [4], E. M. Forster claims that any plot will emphasise causal relationships between events in the narrative. A narrative of an event should therefore present both what happened and an explanation of why it happened.
Narratives, particularly if relating fiction, employ additional structural elements. Commonly a narrative will introduce and then resolve a series of conflicts, the story ending when all conflicts introduced in the story have been resolved. This type of pattern maintains the readers' interest in the story, and actively involves them as they try to predict how conflicts will be resolved and evaluate the resolutions provided in the narrative. This is an important aspect, as it demonstrates that narrative applies not only to the structures formed by the teller of the story, but also those constructed by the reader. The reader does not just receive the narrative but actively constructs a story for themselves during the reading process.
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| Figure 1: Overall scenario of use and evolution of a CH Forum,
showing the interplay between visitors, communities of interest and developers. |
The overall scenario of use and evolution of a CH Forum is illustrated in figure 1. Developers and associated heritage groups provide a "seed content" for the CH Forum, in the form of interconnected narratives. These narratives draw on forum resources such as media components (movies, pictures, text, etc.), knowledge level descriptions of the heritage domain and formal representations of narrative structure. Visitors are able to view and comment on the seed narratives. Visitors can also develop their own narratives using public forum resources in their own personal visitor spaces. They can choose to share these narratives in communities of interest. According to the editorial model adopted by the forum, visitor constructed narratives may become part of the public narrative structure. Developers and members of the associated heritage groups monitor and maintain the forum as it evolves through visitor contributions. This initial model will be extended and refined through out four ongoing test cases.
This research is being conducted within the EU IST funded CIPHER project, IST-2001-32559.
Paul Mulholland
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
URL: <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/paulm/>
Email: p.mulholland@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1908 654506
Fax: +44 1908 653169
Paul Mulholland is a Research Fellow in the Knowledge Media Institute and investigator on the CIPHER project. He has been involved in a number of previous and current research projects; Enrich (Esprit 4 funded project in organizational learning, 1998-2000), Clockwork (Framework 5 funded knowledge management project, 2000-2003), Empowering Learning Communities (Industrially funded project, 2000-2002), and RichODL (EU Socrates programme, 1999-2001) are examples. Dr. Mulholland's professional interests include collaborative learning, knowledge modelling and management and the design and evaluation of educational modelling and visualisation tools.
Zdenek Zdrahal
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
URL: <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/zdenek/>
Email: z.zdrahal@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1908 654512
Fax: +44 1908 653169
Zdenek Zdrahal is a Senior Research Fellow in the Knowledge Media Institute and project manager of CIPHER. He has been a project leader in research projects in the UK, the Czech Republic, and Mexico. In VITAL (Esprit 2 project P-5365) he was involved in model-based reasoning, and in ENCODE (Copernicus 940149) he was responsible for knowledge modelling and project management. Recently, he has been the project leader of the following projects: MGT (Copernicus, 1999-2001), Enrich (Esprit 4, 1998-2000), and Clockwork (Framework 5, 2000-2003. Dr. Zdrahal's research interests include knowledge modelling, sharing and reuse, case-based reasoning, intelligent agents and Web technology.
Trevor Collins
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
URL: <http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/trevor/>
Email: t.d.collins@open.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1908 655731
Fax: +44 1908 653169
Trevor Collins is a Research Fellow on the CIPHER project. He previously worked on the Empowering Learning Communities project, and the Hank Evaluation Project in the Open University's Institute of Educational Technology. His PhD thesis was concerned with the visualization of evolutionary computation. Dr. Collins' research interests include human computer interaction, software visualization, artificial intelligence and knowledge discovery.
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For citation purposes:
Mulholland, P., Zdrahal, Z. and Collins, T. "CIPHER: Enabling Communities of Interest to Promote Heritage of European Regions", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/cipher/>
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By Gesa Büttner and Joerg Torkler - November 2002
Gesa Büttner and Joerg Torkler present the Compendium, a web-based information service on cultural policies in Europe. This article will focus on its technical features and access mechanisms.
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Cultural policies in Europe : a compendium of basic facts and trends (or short: Compendium) is a reference tool on national cultural policies which is available for public use as an online information system on the Internet [1]. It provides administrators, decision-makers, researchers, politicians, journalists, and other interested users with easy access to up-to-date facts, statistics, trends, strategies, examples and current debates of national cultural policy in Europe.
The Compendium is a work in progress which is not only continuously updated and maintained, but also expanded on a regular basis. At the moment (summer 2002), 23 country profiles are available on the Web and more will be added by the end of 2002 including Germany, Greece, Italy and the United Kingdom. Eventually, profiles of all 48 Member States to the European Cultural Convention shall be included [2]. Coverage of policy issues and thematic priorities is being constantly expanded.
The Compendium is a transnational project which was set up in 1998 as a joint venture between the Research Unit of the Cultural Policy and Action Department of the Council of Europe [3] and ERICarts, the European Research Institute for Comparative Cultural Policy and the Arts [4]. The project framework was designed to create a new systematic approach to allow observations about cultural policies in Europe to be generated and comparisons made.
Of core importance is the methodological grid, a thematic outline, which structures the contents of the national policy country profiles in a systematic way covering historical development, administrative context, policy objectives, legal provisions, financing of culture, new partnerships, support for creativity and participation, etc. The grid is numbered and organised up to three levels of subdivision [5].
The Compendium is being realised in partnership with a network of experts. These national authors are responsible for their country profile, work they fulfil in co-operation with the authorities responsible for cultural policy in their respective countries. Editing and quality control is being carried out by a co-ordinating team made up of representatives from the Council of Europe and ERICarts.
The Web site of the Compendium has been designed in frames. Ease of navigation and usability is one of the primary concerns at the heart of the design concept. The use of frames allows the main menu to remain in view at all the times while users browse the wealth of information presented online. In order to facilitate faster access to the content, the frames have been designed to prevent the menu bar from reloading each time a page is refreshed.
The disadvantage of using framesets is that many search engine spiders can only index the parent frameset. This can be avoided by preparing individual country entry pages including meta-tag information and noframe tag content. This enables individual indexing by search engines and allows also for deep linking to a specific country profile [6]. Version 3 browser releases which were not able to display frames required additional support up until early 2001 [7].
For the production of the Compendium Web site in HTML both Macromedia Dreamweaver [8] and a simple text editor were used. Photoshop and Paintshop Pro were used for the picture editing. With regard to application languages, ASP (Active Server Pages), VBScript, Perl, JavaScript were employed. A database in Microsoft Access is also part of the Compendium (see below under Comparative view). The server platform is made up of a Microsoft IIS4 Web server which runs under Windows NT. The Internet Provider is x-dot GmbH, Waltrup 16, 48341 Altenberge, Germany [9].
The functionalities of the Compendium have been designed with Dynamic HTML (DHTML). DHTML is the combination of several built-in browser features in fourth generation browsers that enable a Web page to be more dynamic. The three main technologies that make up DHTML are: HTML, JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). HTML is used for the basic structure of the document, JavaScript to manipulate the Document Object Model (DOM) with the purpose of creating interactive functionalities, and CSS to define the presentation and style of the document [10].
Specific examples of the use of DHTML and in particular of JavaScript in the design of the Compendium are mentioned under the relevant functionalities.
The technique of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has been used to control the presentation of the Compendium. To facilitate the maintenance of over 1,200 HTML documents making up the Compendium, these documents are linked to a stylesheet, an external CSS file, which sets rules for fonts, headings, colours, spacing, etc.
The information in the Compendium is organised in country profiles. In this section, we present the different access and retrieval mechanisms - access by menu, comparative view, full text searching, download option - giving both the user and the technical design perspectives.
The relevant sections and sub-sections can be summarised as follows:
A horizontal scrollable menu bar with the names of available countries provides access to the individual country profiles.
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| Figure 1: The scrollable menu bar |
Within a country profile, the user can go through the text successively using the navigation buttons either at the top left top corner - to go from main chapter to main chapter - or at the bottom right - to navigate linearly through the entire text including its sub-sections and sub-sub-sections.
Another access mode is to jump to any point using a scrollable table of contents.
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| Figure 2: The table of contents |
Figure 2 illustrates the main chapters, i.e. the first level contents. Also the second and third level headings of the table of contents can be displayed and accessed via this single point of entry.
Both the horizontal scrollable menu bar (see Figure 1) and the menu with the table of contents (see Figure 2) have been created in DHTML using JavaScript. The horizontal scrollable menu bar has been inserted in a top frame in order to enable the user to access all available country profiles without losing his or her navigational overview. The interactive table of contents has been designed as a top-vertical sliding menu: it appears - i.e. it "slides" into the screen - when the user clicks on the chapter (or sub-section) button.
More than ten thousand hyperlinks make it possible to navigate between the chapters of all available country profiles. As each country profile is based on an HTML template consisting of 48 single pages, these hyperlinks are organised through a search-and-replace programme. For each newly introduced country profile, the country name simply needs to be replaced in the source code in order to create the appropriate links.
The Compendium is not limited to linear reading, but benefits further from Web technology which interweaves the profiles among each other: the horizontal hyperlinks between the same section of all available country profiles make a cross-country navigation possible. For a transversal reading of the cultural policy profiles the user jumps, for a given topic, from country to country using the country menu bar which remains active also from within the country profile.
For example, in order to get an answer to the question what support measures for artists are available in European countries, one goes to section 8.1.1 Special artists support schemes within any country, and from here one navigates to another country by clicking on the respective country name in the menu bar.
This option to do a cross-country navigation, chapter by chapter, has been designed to allow the user to jump to another country - with one click - without the need to perform a separate search. This special interactive navigation feature has been added to the Compendium Web site thanks to a specific JavaScript function which establishes the hyperlink on the fly according to the user's selection.
In fact, to make the multilateral linking possible, the title and filenames of the 48 files constituting a country profile have been constructed using the following scheme: <country-chapter.html>. For example, "austria-41.html" refers to the file of the sub-chapter 4.1 of the Austrian profile. By clicking on the hyperlink [FRANCE] on the horizontal scrollable menu bar (see above Figure 1) the variable -"france" is passed to a JavaScript function which:
To have achieved the same effect through hand-coded hyperlinks, more than ten thousand of them would have had to be created.
Although the cross-country navigation allows the user to access information on a specific topic for different countries, it does not gather the data on one screen. One of the features made available in the Compendium, is a COMPARATIVE VIEW option located on the horizontal menu bar. This feature offers an overview of national cultural policy information which is readily quantifiable or synopsised, such as public expenditure in culture or cultural policy priorities. The data has been prepared specifically for this feature, thus synthesising or complementing the actual text of the country profiles. For each topic, the users can select one, several, or all countries in relation to individual information needs.
For example, the priorities of state cultural spending in the three Baltic States are displayed in Figure 3.
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| Figure 3: Display result of the comparative view option |
This comparative view feature is possible thanks to a small Microsoft Access database which is searched using Active Server Pages (ASP), a server script commonly used for display database information. Since this code is processed on the server and returned as plain HTML text, even browsers which do not support JavaScript or ActiveX can view the result pages in HTML.
The database for the comparative view in the Compendium contains an individual table for each theme. When the user clicks on the SEARCH DATABASE button, the selection of a theme and countries is sent to an ASP file. This file is used to perform an SQL query and redirect the information to another ASP file which establishes a connection to the database on the server. In response to the SQL request, an HTML page with a table like that displayed in Figure 3 will be produced.
Another means of accessing the information contained in the Compendium is a full text search function which is accessible via the option SEARCH in the horizontal menu bar.
The search engine complements the table of contents offering natural language searching which is particularly helpful when looking for specific concepts which are not covered in the thematic outline such as "access to culture", specific sectors such as "museums", proper names, and so on.
The search result consists of specific sections (i.e. chapter, sub-section or sub-sub-section) of the Compendium, presented in the form of a hit list which is ranked according to the relevance of the text to the query. For example, if the search expression appears several times in a section, it receives a higher score than if it appears only once, etc.
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| Figure 4: Example of a search result presentation |
When clicking on any of the results, the relevant section will be displayed with the search term(s) highlighted in colour so that users identify it easily.
Full text searching is executed by means of the Verity Search Engine 97. Verity Search 97 - also marketed as Verity Information Server - is one of the top corporate search retrieval products. It was considered innovative when it was first introduced and remains highly competitive today. In May 2002 Verity, Inc. released a new version called Verity K2 Developer [11].
Verity 97 allows the definition of so called "zones", specific sections within an HTML document to which searches can be limited. This special feature is indeed necessary for the Compendium in which the presence of the scrollable table of contents in each chapter (see above Figure 2) must not distort retrieval results. Thanks to Verity Search 97 text parts which are relevant for searching are indicated with specific HTML tags, so that accurate search results can be achieved. Featuring a powerful, integrated scripting language, easy content indexing, and accurate and precise retrieval, the Verity Search 97 search engine provides the functionality required to conduct a fine-tuned search such as exact phrase searching, support of Boolean operators, and proximity searching.
It also provides the means to define synonyms to extend the retrieval scope for a given term. Thus, searching with the term "European Union" also retrieves documents containing "EU", etc. Within the Compendium, the adaptation of the search engine for synonyms has been used in particular for different spellings and word forms, and only in a limited way for related concepts; the latter would contradict the intuitive understanding of natural language searching in comparison with an explicitly controlled vocabulary.
Each country profile can be downloaded in its totality in PDF format. This option is provided via the DOWNLOAD button on the main menu at the very top. Additional or original language versions of the profiles are also available as PDF files.
Compendium Web server activity is being monitored with Webtrends [12] software. During the first five months of 2002, the Compendium Web site logged an average of 70 user sessions per day.
The reaction of users, gathered via the feedback form on the Compendium Web site has been very encouraging and positive. Users' questions mostly concentrated on the absence of a certain country profile rather than on technical enquiries. Such feedback, which is channelled to the relevant authorities, clearly demonstrates the need for this type of information service. Participation in the Compendium project is voluntary and interest in taking part is expressed by a country via its national delegate to the Steering Committee for Culture of the Council of Europe.
Reactions from users do not only refer to the fact that there is finally a tool which can comprehensively answer questions on national cultural policies in Europe. They also concern the design and access modalities. In this context, the Compendium was selected "Web site of the month" by the British journal Information World Review in 2001 [13]. In July 2002, the Compendium was awarded the Best Practices Award for Social Sciences which is organised by the Department of Anthropology of the University of California and which identifies social science sites of high quality on the Internet [14].
During the second half of 2002 the Web site of the Compendium will be further developed, bearing in mind its imminent enlargement by additional countries.
New interactive features will be added such as:
The Compendium is a user-friendly service which monitors cultural policies in Europe and places relevant information at the fingertips of the interested public. It offers a variety of access and retrieval options, and has the potential for integrating further information sources.
At the end of February 2003, a new edition of the Compendium replaced the one described here. This version comprises not only new content - the thematic structure has been enlarged and deepened and five more country profiles have been added, including that of the UK - but also a revised design and new functions. An additional menu guides the user more easily, complemented by an online "How to use" help section. Of particular interest to the readers of this article might be the new interactive cross-country printing feature which matches the cross-country navigation option. When printing a specific chapter of a country profile, users can add the corresponding chapters of other countries, thus customising their own report.
Gesa Büttner
Information Manager
Cultural Policy and Action Department
Directorate General IV
F-67075 Strasbourg Cedex
France
URL: <http://www.coe.int/Culture/>
Email: gesa.buttner@coe.int
Phone: +33 388 41 2642
Fax: +33 388 41 3782
Gesa Büttner works as information manager in the Cultural Policy and Action Department of the Council of Europe providing information services to internal and external users.
Joerg Torkler
Development Director
MEDIANALE-GROUP
Blücherstr. 5
D-53115 Bonn
Germany
URL: <http://www.medianale.com/>
img src="../../images/bu_email.gif" alt="Link to an email address" />
Phone: +49 228 9140877
Joerg Torkler works as freelance Internet consultant and runs the Web design agency MEDIANALE-GROUP in Bonn, Germany.
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For citation purposes:
Büttner, G. and Torkler, J. "The online Compendium: a web-based information system on cultural policies in Europe", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/compendium/>
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By Annette Kelly and Domitilla Fagan - November 2002
Annette Kelly and Domitilla Fagan report on the Cultural Heritage Project, a new digitisation initiative addressed to Irish libraries, museums and archives.
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The Cultural Heritage Project is an initiative coordinated by the Branching Out Steering Group Cultural Heritage Panel, managed by An Chomhairle Leabharlanna (The Library Council) and funded by the Department of the Environment and Local Government in the Irish cultural sector. It focuses on the digitisation and provision of new modes of access to cultural heritage material in libraries, archives and museums in Ireland [1].
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| Figure 1: AskAboutIreland Cultural Heritage Project top level page |
The purpose of the project is to enable public libraries, archives and museums to provide access for citizens to their cultural holdings and to provide citizens with access to relevant local content. The emphasis is on access and preservation issues are also addressed.
The development of a national policy for the digitisation of cultural heritage content was influenced by a number of EU initiatives including eEurope 2002, the adoption of the Lund Principles [2] and the following formation of the National Representatives Group, and the experience of participating in the 5th Framework Programme take-up action Activate [3].
At national level, in 1998 the Branching Out report [4] recommended that a digitisation programme would provide access to digitised content of local studies holdings across the country. The Digicult report [5] also recommended that national, regional and local governments should support wide-focus projects aiming at delivering consistent, methodical approaches to the digitisation of cultural material. The Branching Out Steering Committee established the Cultural Heritage Panel to investigate delivering this objective.
Following a proposal from the Panel, in March 2002 the Department of the Environment and Local Government approved a funding for a six month project to work with library authorities. The project aims are to:
In June 2002, The Heritage Council granted an additional funding to include museums and archives in the project.
The project will establish a comprehensive and up-to-date record of the local studies holdings in public libraries. It will prioritise content in terms of access and conservation, and will investigate co-operation in relation to shared access to selected collections with the National Library, the National Archives and the National Museum, academic institutions and Northern Ireland repositories, among others. The project will survey digital initiatives and will examine copyright and reproductive rights issues. An assessment of the current position in relation to digitisation of local newspapers, automated indexing, indexing standards and common portals will be included in the survey.
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| Figure 2: AskAboutIreland Gazetteer page |
An important aspect of the Cultural Heritage Project is the selection and execution, in co-operation with players in the libraries sector, of three Pilot Projects. These Pilot Projects are to address key issues in the digitisation process as well as establish local expertise in content selection, digitisation, web publication, etc. Two additional projects, aimed at the museum and archive sectors and funded by The Heritage Council have been added to the scope of the Cultural Heritage Project.
The call for proposals for digitisation pilot projects from local authorities closed last July. The aims of the pilot projects are:
There was a very good response from libraries, museums and archives to the Call for Proposals for the Cultural Heritage Project. The standard of the proposals was excellent and showed a clear understanding of the objectives of the project.
The following five proposals were selected for funding:
Negotiations with the selected proposers have been completed. A training week for their project teams has been organised by An Chomhairle Leabharlanna and will take place in early October.
In parallel with the five pilot projects, a national thematic network on "The Big House: aspects of the landed estates" will also be set up. Local studies librarians through newly established regional groups will work with the project team to select and prepare content which will be accessible via the portal site. In addition to providing exciting content on the Web, this pilot project will provide library authorities with a certain level of expertise in relation to digitisation and will also provide broadly based knowledge for the overall project. It is hoped that all local authority libraries will be represented in, and benefit from, this project.
An important aspect of the project will be to provide recommendations and guidelines on a National Digitisation Programme in a final report. The final report will be presented at a national information day to a wide representation of the memory institutions and policy makers.
Further details on the Cultural Heritage Project and its activities are available from Annette Kelly and/or Domitilla Fagan .
Annette Kelly
Assistant Director
An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council
53 & 54 Upper Mount Street
Dublin 2, Ireland
Telephone +353 1 6761963 / 67611167
Fax +353 1 6766721
URL: <http://www.librarycouncil.ie/>
Email: akelly@librarycouncil.ie
Annette Kelly is Assistant Director of An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council. She has academic and public library experience before being appointed to The Library Council. She is a national advisor on the development of library buildings and services.
She is a member the Branching Out Steering Committee which is the development plan for public libraries in Ireland and Chairman of the Cultural Heritage Panel. She is Chairman of the Public Library Research Programme Committee. She manages the information dissemination function for the Fifth Framework Programme accompanying measure CULTIVATE . She is Secretary of the Euro-Focus on the Cultural Heritage which operates the Irish national node in CULTIVATE.
Annette Kelly is currently Project Manager of the Branching Out Cultural Heritage National Digitisation Project and is a member of the Permanent Representative Group on the EU Coordination of Digital Policy Programmes She has been involved in a number of EU funded research projects, IRIS, Europagate, Universe and is now managing the Fifth Framework project Activate .
Domitilla
Fagan
Executive Librarian
An Chomhairle Leabharlanna/The Library Council
53 & 54 Upper Mount Street
Dublin 2, Ireland
Telephone +353 1 6761963 / 67611167
Fax +353 1 6766721
URL: <http://www.librarycouncil.ie/>
Email: dfagan@librarycouncil.ie
Domitilla Fagan is Executive Librarian of An Chomhairle Leabharlanna / The Library Council. She assists in the management of the co-operation functions of An Chomhairle.
She is Secretary of the Public Library Research Programme Committee and of the Cultural Heritage Panel. She assists the information dissemination function for the Fifth Framework Programme accompanying measure CULTIVATE and she is responsible for the editing of its Web site.
Domitilla Fagan is currently Project Officer of the Branching Out Cultural Heritage National Digitisation Project.
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For citation purposes:
Kelly,A. and Fagan,D. "Not only Shamrocks: Digitising Local Studies Material in Ireland", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/digitisation/>
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By Nadezhda Brakker and Leonid Kujbyshev -November 2002
Nadezhda Brakker and Leonid Kujbyshev of Centre PIC provide us with a view of new trends in state information policy in the Russian cultural sphere including legislation together with examples of IST in Russian cultural institutions and new perspectives on international co-operation. This article is based on a paper given by Nadezda at EVA2002 London.
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'Culture x Technology' is an extremely important strategic area for Russia. Despite the economic problems of the last decade, substantial progress has been made in this field and with international help from organisations such as Mellon, the Soros Foundation, UNESCO and the European Union, the pace is increasing.
This article seeks to present an overview of the Information Society & Technology across the whole spectrum of Russian culture including not only archives, libraries and museums but also contemporary art and the non-moveable heritage, (architecture, monuments etc).
We will also give an account of EVA Russia since 1998 with its strategic role in promoting relationships in 'Culture x Technology', both within Russia and between Russia and the international community, especially the other parts of the former USSR and the EU. In 2002, efforts to help bring Russia into the international project partnerships in 'Culture x Technology' with the European Union have been strengthened by the new CULTIVATE Russia, building on previous and current efforts of the EC's EVA Cluster project and EVA Networking projects [1].
A final section briefly presents key conclusions and future perspectives.
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| Figure 1: Screenshot: The Russian Public Centre of Internet Technologies |
According to the results of research carried out by Russian Public Centre of Internet Technologies (ROCIT [2]), in 2001 the number of Internet connections reached 5 million (compared with 3.4 million in 2000) and the audience of Runet (Russian Internet) is now 18 million users (11.4 million users in 2000). The regular audience is estimated at 8 million users (those who use the Internet at least once a week). At the same time the percentage of corporate users (those who use the Internet from an office, an educational institution, a library or other point of common access) grew to 65%, which is 5% more than in 2000. Most of the increase in users of Runet was due to so-called irregular users who visited the Internet more than once. This means that the Internet is still needed for work and education and that the effort to organise common access Internet points in libraries, museums, clubs, educational institutions has not been wasted and brings in new Internet users. This reinforces the idea that for Russia with its vast territory and poor population the possibility of Internet access in places of common use in libraries, in the universities, or at school is very important.
79% of Russian Internet users are younger then 45. Stable growth of Internet users has been identified among managers (20%) and students (30%). 35% of the Runet audience use the Internet at home and 73% of them have a monthly income below $100 per person.
Geographically the Russian Internet audience is still concentrated in Moscow (57,2%) and Saint-Petersbourg (9,1%); 72 second level domains are in the capitals of Russia, (Moscow and Saint-Petersburg), though more activity was registered in the regions in 2001. A considerable digital divide continues to exist between Moscow and the regions of Russia.
The speed of Runet audience growth is somewhat lower then in previous years. The Spylog Company considers that the reasons for this recent trend are related to the approaching saturation point as regards Moscow Internet usage, the poor quality of telephone connections in the regions and a low level of awareness of the capacities and benefits of the Internet. ROCIT considers that the Russian Internet audience is not growing very quickly because of the high cost of personal computers and the low availability of Internet connections using other cheaper terminals (specialised TV devices, for example) [3] .
In the beginning of March 2002 the largest search engine in Runet, Yandex [4], estimated Russian Internet volume at 1 terabyte (240 bytes or 1024 gigabytes). In 2000 the Russian Internet became much "wider", that is, a lot of new sites with just a few pages appeared. This was because in 2000 several large hosting portals (like narod.ru) were opened. They gave anyone free space for sites, third level domain addresses (such as xxx.narod.ru) and easy tools to create Web pages without special training. By contrast, in 2001 there was a tendency towards growth "in depth" and sites grew larger.
The overall volume of Runet more than doubled whilst the number of new sites was smaller than in the previous year. The median volume of a site (server) became larger then in the "pre-hosting" period and is now 2.5 megabytes. According to Spylog analysis, the proportion of cultural resources on Runet constituted 17.6% of the sites visited.
Federal bodies started to pay serious attention to the Internet and to the information society after President Putin signed the Global Information Society Okinava Hartia adopted by G8 in July 2000. Consequently Russian State Information Society policy is becoming more and more detailed.
On 10 January 2002, President Putin signed a federal law on electronic signatures, thereby rendering an electronic signature legally equivalent to a graphic signature; therefore a document signed electronically retains all its pre-degitial properties. A law on electronic business was discussed in the State Duma and passed the first reading.
A Federal Programme "Electronic Russia 2002 - 2010" has been adopted. It states that development of information and communication technology (ICT) is a global trend in world development. Modern information and communication technology plays a decisive role in economic competitiveness and integration into the world economic system. It is improving effectiveness on all levels in both public and private sectors. ICT gives a technological basis for the development of civil society as it gives open and prompt access to information through the global Internet. The Programme will enable maximum use of intellectual potential, provide a way to enter the global post-industrial economy on a basis of co-operation and open information, overcome the "digital divide" and protect human rights including the right of free access to information and the right to protect private information [5]. It is a pity that the Ministry of Culture is not an official partner of the Programme but cultural heritage projects can be supported on a project basis.
The government decree on Internet connections in post offices all over Russia aims to provide Internet access to people lacking facilities and skills. It is planned to organise centres of collective Internet access in 1,860 regional post-offices. In December 2001 the KiberPost@ Net had 120 Internet points.
In 2001 the Ministry of Education of Russia, in co-operation with regional authorities completed a programme of computerisation in country schools, supplying hardware and software together with teacher training in 97% of schools [6].
Several projects involving training courses for school teachers are managed by the Federation of Internet Education [7]. One of the projects, "Generation.ru", is supported by an oil company, YUKOS. The goal of "Generation.ru" is to overcome a serious lag between Russia and other countries in ICT skills and equipment in educational institutions. The project will run for 5 years and organise Education Internet Centres in 50 regions where more then 250,000 school teachers will learn how to use the Internet for education. These teachers will be able to teach more than 10 million pupils. In July 2001 the 25th centre was opened in Orechovo-Zuevo. 26,122 school teachers were trained under the project between 21March 2000 and 4 July 2002.
The Federal Programme "Electronic Government" is proving very successful: the official Internet sites of the President, of the Security Council, the Russian Government, [8], of the State Duma, of all Ministers, and of regional administrations [9] have been opened. The Internet site of the Ministry of Taxes was the winner in the contest for the "National Internet Prize".
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| Figure 2: Screenshot: The Saint-Petersburg Portal |
The Ministry of Culture also has an Internet site [10] which is becoming more important for cultural sector management. The site keeps information on the Ministry structure and staff, a reference list of federal and regional cultural institutions, documents, plans and programmes, laws on museums, libraries, etc., together with news and other useful information.
Some Internet servers of regional administrations have pages on culture with lists of institutions, news and events, art galleries, etc.
At the Saint-Petersburg portal [11] the News of Culture section plays an important role. It keeps a catalogue of museums, palaces, parks, cathedrals, churches of Saint-Petersburg, their location on the city map, information and links to Web sites.
The Art, History and Culture section of the ALL Moscow Portal [12] gives access to Moscow sites, Moscow as depicted on old engravings, paintings and photographs, Moscow churches and old Russian art. The list of Moscow museums, (though not complete) offers links to museum WEB-sites, theatres and concert halls references etc.
Not only capitals present their portals or servers on the Internet. There are a number of valuable regional information resources. A number of Internet sites containing regional cultural resources have been opened in the Russian Internet sector. Just a small list of regional cultural sites will show the tendency: "Yaroslavl museums together" [13], "Museums of Nizhny Novgorod" [14]"Museums of Omsk and Irtysh region" [15] "Culture of Karelia" [16] "Museums of Novgorod" [17]and others.
For example, a new Internet server "Museums of Siberia " presents 7 museums of the region and is addressed to public and to professionals. Each museum site has got the same structure: Museum guide, News, Museum Shop, Exhibition Exchange, Contacts, Search Projects, References, Forum. When Siberia site is in Russian, "Culture of Karelia" is in Russian, English and Finnish and contains information resources on education, tourism, museums, libraries, monuments of the region.
Another example is the Information portal on Orel city and Orel region [18] which contains news, culture, reference-book, churches and museums, artists, theatre festival (Russian). More examples: Vologda region Internet site [19] is in Russian, English, German and French; Evenkia [20] has English pages with nature, tourism, traditions, rituals, list of artists and an art gallery.
Culture of Russia [21] is an official Portal of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation. The project was started in 2000. The idea of the Portal is to present Russian Culture and to serve as an educational resource for a wide audience. The pilot version has a news and events section and three ways in: topic entry (fine art, literature, architecture, theatre, cinema, music, applied arts), type entry (persons, works, stories, events, sites, cultural institutions guide and board) and a time scale. The pilot version contains 1500 objects, 252 persons, 484 works, 557 images, 557 organisations, 16 articles, 2457 links between the objects and 60684 words in the searching guide. It will be bilingual but now only menus and the front page are in English. The Portal has a nice design and is going to be a good encyclopaedia of Russian Culture with its own rich information resource and some links to other cultural information resources. Culture of Russia does not create its own catalogue of Internet resources but links to portals and servers with rich catalogues of cultural resources. Because of lack of financing the portal is still in a pilot version.
Libraries are ahead of other cultural sectors in IST. In many libraries of Moscow and Saint-Petersbourg (for example, library system Kievskaya [22]) and in all large state regional libraries there are mediathekas or Internet-halls with free Internet access. Many libraries provide their catalogues on the Internet. The list of available library catalogues can be found at the site of the Russian Library Association [23] which plays an important role in the process of library informatisation and develops the RUSMARC format. The Library Department of the Ministry of Culture organises and actively supports IST processes in libraries. Since 1997 the Department leads a specialised programme LIBNET (Library Net) [24] "Development of All-Russia Information Library Computer Net". A new project of the LIBNET programme is a National Information Library Centre [25]
The first stage of the project (2001 - 2003) is to create a specialised net for the united electronic catalogue of Russian libraries. The catalogue will play a very important role and will make it possible to obtain information on the stocks of all the largest libraries of Russia, to organise intelligent document delivery to users all over Russia, to co-ordinate the development of library stocks and to organise shared cataloguing for the majority of Russian libraries. Currently the National Information Library Centre keeps catalogues of new books of the Russian State Library (Moscow) and the Russian National Library (Saint-Petersbourg) and a mechanism for downloading catalogue descriptions which can be used by any subscribing library.
At the end of 1998 an 18-month project under TACIS (Creating an Information System for the Russian State Library) was started: the Russian State Library (RSL) Information Project. It aimed to support the modernisation of the Russian State Library from a traditional to a digital library, introducing new information technology to meet the growing information needs of the Russian market and bring to life the vast resources of the national library. The TACIS project was successfully finished in 2000 with the conference "Digital Future of the Libraries". On March 12, 2002 the Russian State Library announced a new international project "Development of digital services system for RSL users". The main components of the project are:
The project runs for 18 months from January 2002 till June 2003 and is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The British Council represents Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in RSL. The project leader is Monika Segbert.
Museums are some way behind libraries in IST. Electronic catalogues of Russian museums contain no more then 10,8% of Russian museum holdings and these catalogues are without images in the main. There are practically no museum catalogues on open access though there are some leaders. For example, the State Hermitage Internet site [26], designed with IBM support, is considered to be the best and was awarded the National Internet prize in 2001 and 2002. In 2001 the first museum on-line shop with all needed components of e-commerce opened at the State Hermitage site [27]. The State Rybinsk architecture and art museum-reserve was the first museum in Russia to open its full collection catalogue on the Internet [28] with good search facilities. The catalogue is based on the specialised software for museum collection management IAMIS2000, designed by ALTSOFT (Saint-Petersbourg).
The Portal "Museums of Russia" [29] plays the leading role in presenting museum information on the Internet. Since 1996 this portal has been developed by the non-commercial institution Russian Cultural Heritage Net. Since 1996 the portal has been improved several times to answer growing user needs and has won more then 30 awards, the National Internet Prize being one of them. Among cultural sites the portal is the first in number of citations and in number of visitors (2.3 million). The portal is important both for professionals and for the public and includes:
The portal plans to add a children's section, cultural tourism section, Internet-shop and a gallery.
The (museum) Association on Documentation and Information Technologies (ADIT) [30] plays a large role in museum IST activities. Since 1997 ADIT organises annual conferences "Museums and Information Space: informatisation and cultural heritage" in different cities. The 6th ADIT conference was in Nizhny Novgorod May 27 - 31, 2002. ADIT is a partner in the EU "Open Heritage" project, aiming to present the Karelia region in the open European net. Another project (RUSSIAN DIMENSION) was born as a consequence of ADIT participation in OPEN HERITAGE. The project develops models for applying new technologies to Russian regional memory institutions. The aim of the project is twofold. On one hand it provides services for the museum, ranging from network and facility management to promotion. On the other hand it presents the museum as a part of the cultural heritage of a region, thus strengthening the profile of the region and enhancing its attractiveness towards the cultural tourist [31].
The most proactive education techniques are used at "Project&Analysis Workshops" (PAW) organised and held by ADIT jointly with its partner, the Future Museum group. The key topics of PAW are Information Management in the Cultural Sphere, Information Technology and the Cultural Heritage. The workshops are targeted at administrators of culture departments and organisations, the staff of museums and libraries. A workshop of this kind is aimed primarily at generating ideas and developing them into projects. Participants of a PAW are not divided into trainers and students. Every workshop has participants, experts, co-ordinators and a facilitator who enables communication in the sessions. PAW are collective efforts at which problems are first identified and then ideas are generated and formed into projects. Activities include group work, master-classes, lectures, presentations, expert consultations and plenary sessions. In just fifteen months, over 300 heads of culture departments and museum and library staff came from various Russian regions to be trained at PAW. A follow-up on the workshops is the education manual on Information Technology and the Cultural Heritage now available [32][33].
Other professional museum associations also play an important role in the museum sector, the Association of Museum specialists of Russia (AMR) [34], for example. The AMR Resource Centre is a co-ordination and management body of AMR with the following goals:
Archives are the most "closed" part of the Russian cultural heritage though IST is bringing about considerable changes in this sector. The Federal Archive Service of Russia has an Internet site [35] with information on the archive sector, legislation, a catalogue of federal and regional archives, documents, a list of archiving institutions thematic data-bases, archive education information, a list of reference books and other publications, news and other useful information. A catalogue of the Moscow and Saint-Petersburg Archives in Russian and English [36] is based on a specialised data-base ArcheoBiblioBase (ABB). This was designed as a result of a Russian - USA joint project with the Russian Federal Archive Service, the State Historical Public Library and the Saint-Petersbourg branch of the Russian Academy of Science Archive.
"Personal Photodocuments Internet-catalogue of the Central State Archive of cinema and photo documents of Saint-Petersbourg" [37] is a good example of an on-line catalogue. Currently it provides access to 5000 document descriptions automatically generated from the archive database. The access mechanism is based on intranet-internet technologies and has a good search engine with effective searches on headings, key words and context. The importance of the on-line catalogue will grow since the full archive collection has 500 000 unique photo documents. The database is managed by archive specialists with technology and software developed by ALTSOFT (Saint-Petersbourg) [38].
A new project started in 2000 is the Russian Archives Online (RAO) the main objective of which is the creation and launching onto Internet of large volume databases containing the descriptions of audio and visual materials from Russian archival collections. It aims to provide access to archival documents for numerous users in Russia and worldwide. Although Russian archival collections are well organised on the basis of traditional, "pre-computer" methods, one can use their materials only after tiresome research efforts on-site having looked through cards of paper catalogues written either manually or with the help of a typewriter. Even in Russia there are few people who are aware of the rich audio and visual archival collections. Making on-line educational resources (in particular, connected with the history of Russia) based on archival collections constitutes a top priority activity within the framework of the project.
The project also foresees e-commerce, i.e. licensing archival audio and visual materials selected from specially created databases. The proceeds will be used for collection preservation. This has already begun. The project is supported by a number of international organisations - the US Agency for International Development, Internews, the Open Society Institute, UNESCO, as well as the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR). Apart from archival employees, the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics with the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow and Texas Universities, the Abamedia Company (USA) contribute to the development of the project.
Although the project was named Russian Archives Online only a little less than a year ago, the actual work began as far back as 1996 when a decision was made to create an electronic catalogue of the Russian State Archive for Documentaries and Photos in Krasnogorsk (RGAKFD). This Archive possesses the largest collection of documentaries and stills that reflect the history of Russia and Soviet republics. The Krasnogorsk Archive has in its stock more than 215 thousand reels of documentaries, more than 38,000 titles of which more than 1 thousand date back to before the Revolution. The Archive stores more than 1 million photos and negatives, as well as unique albums of the Tsarist Family. The Krasnogorsk Collection that represents an illustrated history of Russia from the middle of the XIX century arouses the interest not only of non-fiction filmmakers or mass media all over the world, but constitutes a major source of documentary materials for scientific and especially historical research The archival collection plays an even more important role for the whole range of activities connected with education both in Russia itself and beyond.
At present the database for the electronic catalogue of the Krasnogorsk Archive contains descriptions of the larger part of its collection of films (25,000 descriptions). The catalogue can be accessed on-line [39] and is distributed on CDs. Cataloguing continues and in a year the database will have descriptions of the whole film collection. This year an English version of the electronic catalogue has been started. A methodology has been developed and tested to use Systran Professional machine translation with the subsequent editing of the texts entered into the electronic catalogue database containing English descriptions of films from the RGAKFD Collection. 3,000 descriptions have been translated and launched on-line [40].As the analysis of the results gained shows, this methodology used for translating a large volume database into English gives a result that is quite acceptable from the point of view of quality at relatively low cost. The Krasnogorsk electronic catalogue will be wholly translated into English on the basis of this approach. Completing the Krasnogorsk Archive catalogue and its translation into English are financed by the Open Society Institute. Apart from the Krasnogorsk Archive catalogue, two other catalogues that represent the collection of the Russian State Archive for Scientific and Technical Documentation (RGANTD) have been made and launched on-line. This Archive stores a large number of unique photos and films about the history and development of astronautics, missiles and spaceships. Within the framework of the Project, a catalogue was made that includes 3 000 photos of the greatest interest and their descriptions from the Archive collection. Space photos cataloguing was sponsored by UNESCO. The catalogue was launched on-line [41] and its CD version has already been prepared.
An electronic catalogue containing descriptions of documentaries on space exploration from the collection of the Russian State Archive for Scientific and Technical Documentation has also been developed and launched on-line [42]. These activities were sponsored by the Open Society Institute. [43].
The portal 'Architecture of Russia' [44] has been on the net since July 1999 and deals with the history of Russian architecture, modern design and construction projects. It is addressed to architects, art-critics and those, who are interested in Russian culture. It covers the history of the architecture of Russia, non-movable heritage of history and culture and includes news, publications, contests, problems of restoration, educational institutions, bibliography and links, a catalogue of monuments (now 370 monuments, 940 photos) and catalogue of new buildings (in development). (English, Russian).
The catalogue had one "card" for each architectural monument. It consists of one photo, brief textual information and the plan or graphic reconstruction of the original view of a monument. There is the section "More" for most of the cards with detailed texts and additional illustrations. In the upper part of this page it is possible to choose how to search the catalogue (by alphabet, by chronology, by place, by architect, by style). According to the user's choice, a specified table of contents appears on the left to help to define the choice more precisely. Monument types (bridge, cathedral, church, chamber, commercial court etc.)
The alphabetical list is subdivided according to the general names of buildings (cathedral, church, mansion, etc). Within these main sections objects are organised alphabetically according to their conventional names. Churches are disposed by dedication (Trinity, Assumption, etc), other edifices by the most known appellation (Sheremetiev palace, Demidov palace, etc).
The chronological list is divided according to the main periods of the development of Russian architecture. Inside this section objects are placed in chronological sequence.
Architecture of Russia was awarded the Grand Prix at the Intel Internet Prize contest in the Art & Museums section in 2000.
"History and Cultural Monuments of Pskov and Pskov Region" [45], a full Internet catalogue of a region's non-movable heritage is the first in Russia. This is an Internet presentation of an image database developed and maintained by Pskov Research and Application Centre on History and Culture Monuments Preservation. The catalogue includes more than 300 full and well-structured architectural and historical descriptions of the most valuable monuments of Pskov and region with more then 1000 images and plans. The project is run by ALTSOFT (Saint-Petersbourg) [46].
Contemporary art and literature resources are more popular among the Internet user group then cultural heritage resources; that is why they are more interesting for the Internet portals earning their living from banner advertising.
Here are two examples of the most interesting projects in contemporary art resources which are growing to the level of portals very speedily:
The ARTINFO project was started in 1991 and now it is the largest in Russia Visual Arts Databank containing today 1241 authors, 6663 images and 240 establishments helping modern artists to sell images and works world wide. It has got news line which was a laureate of Intel Internet premium 2000 contest, music section and links to more than 100 of Contemporary Fine Art's Net resources that from the point of ARTINFO could be of great interest for both professionals and wide circle of art lovers.
"Russian Contemporary Art" is the biggest web-site telling about Contemporary Russian Art on the Internet and is based on the Guelman Gallery site [47]. The headlines of the site report about the main activities in Contemporary Art field: Artists, Critics, Organizations and others. The contents of the headlines are refreshed two or three times a week:
Server "Literature" [48] contains an annotated catalogue of the best literary resources of RUNET: electronic libraries, reviews of new books, literary contests etc. There are about 100 virtual full-text libraries in the Russian sector of the Internet. Here are two examples:
The Maxim Moshkov Library [49] is the best known Russian virtual library and opened in 1994. Readers replenishes it daily. Fiction, fantasy, policy, history, poetry, technical documentation, contemporary music, tourism etc. About 30 000 full texts of books on-line, monthly traffic 210Gb. The maximal nearness of Maxim Moshkov assembly of texts to the readers needs explains high popularity of the electronic library.
Moshkov has developed the simple and flexible approach to the copyright problem, he has declared, that he will delete from his site any materials on which the author or the publisher will have claims from library. After contacts between the electronic library and authors only two of 30 demanded to remove their books. Thus, Moshkov library became an important infrastructure project of the Russian Internet. It seems that there is a threat to the interests of publishers in such a popularity as it is possible to read the text of a novel from a computer screen. But in reality people often buy the books they like after reading on-line. No wonder, that in the future among the sources of financing of his electronic library Maxim Moshkov sees, besides grants and "personal funds of librarians ", advertising and sale of paper books.
The Public Internet Library [50] was created as an Electronic Library and offers: the electronic archives of Russian press beginning from 1990; the electronic versions of more than 600 Russian national newspapers and magazines including those from 70 Russian regions; the complete description of bibliographical sources in accordance with international standards; and comprehensive professional search-technologies. The Library also suggests packages of high-quality info-analytical materials and monitoring of Russian press on topics (part of them are also prepared in English). Registered as an non-profit autonomous public library, "Public Library (On-line)" is functioning on the basis of the Russian Federal Law "On Libraries", and respectively "ensures the right of its clients for information about the library's funds, for free use of materials from the library's archives, and for other custom-services including those provided on commercial basis". The Public Library is a full-member of "The Russian Library Association (RLA)" and "International Federation of Libraries' Association (IFLA)".
The Public Library Project was lunched on April 2000 to promote the rights of each individual for free access to information, for free cultural development, and for education. Its activity is aimed at the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and information among the people of Russia and other nations. The major goal of the Public Library is announced as the contribution to the development of a global community and to the strengthening a sense of community.
Since 1998 the annual international conference EVA Moscow has played an important role in the Russian "Culture X Technology" sector. Centre PIC is the main EVA Moscow organiser in co-operation with the State Tretyakov Gallery and VASARI Enterprises UK.
The themes of EVA Moscow are actually wider than electronic imaging and the visual arts and cover all aspects of new technologies in cultural heritage. Though EVA Moscow is mostly oriented to the heritage institutions it includes a strong R&D aspect as well. Moscow EVA has a strong international aspect and is the only conference in Russia where specialists from different sectors of the cultural area (museums, galleries, libraries, archives, non-movable cultural heritage institutions) gather to discuss common problems of new information and communication technologies implementation in cultural heritage area. The government, research and technological sectors are also involved. As a rule EVA Moscow attracts about 600 delegates, speakers and exhibitors from Russia, former Soviet republics and the New Independent States in helping 'Culture x Technology' across Russian, Eastern Europe and building international relations as well as from EU countries and the USA. The Open Society Institute (Soros Foundation - Moscow) helps to bring delegates and speakers from the Russian regions. The Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technologies of Russia support every EVA Moscow. As a special event the exhibition "Multimedia in Culture, Art and Education" is organised every year. CD-ROMs, Internet-sites, data-bases, software and hardware for cultural institutions, video-films on culture, art and education are presented at the exhibition. The traditional place of EVA Moscow is the State Tretyakov Gallery though some conference events are located at other places, including the State Darwin Museum. Working languages are Russian and English with simultaneous interpretation; Conference Proceedings (full texts) are published in English and Russian. All conference events, Proceedings etc. are free of charge for speakers and delegates and exhibition space and equipment is also free of charge for the exhibitors. An Announcement, Call for papers, Programme, a list of delegates and speakers etc. are published on the Internet [51]; on-line registration is organised; full text papers, illustrated exhibition catalogue and photo-album are also on the Internet. All Internet publications are in Russian and English. The Internet hosting of EVA Moscow is supplied by ARTINFO. Cultural visits to Moscow museums and libraries during the conference week are free.
Traditional topics of EVA Moscow are strategic issues; international co-operation; regional aspects; IST for museums, libraries, archives, non-movable heritage; new technologies and contemporary art; technological issues; standards and meta-data. EVA2001 Moscow brought several new topics, which highlighted special interests and new trends. The most interesting sessions were " Digital Access to Cultural Heritage: Audio and video archives and funds" and "Access to Digital Cultural and Social Heritage: Cultural Diversity and Dialogue". Contacts with educational institutions and pedagogic departments of museums enriched EVA Moscow with a section called "Information Technologies for Museum Pedagogic" and with a new form of conference activity: a game-contest for teenagers on Russian Art, which was based on creative computer approaches. The especially important regional aspect was underlined by a session "Presenting the Regions: Information Resources of Kuzbass" which brought to Moscow EVA a far-away coal region. EVA2001 Moscow Proceedings [51] were actively used to prepare this article.
The jubilee Fifth EVA2002 Moscow will be held December 2 -7 in the State Tretyakov Gallery with the theme "Information for all: Culture and Information Society Technologies". It is planned to organise a workshop "East Europe, Baltic Countries, Russia, NIS - perspectives of co-operation". EVA2002 Moscow is a good place for dissemination of EU IST policy and activities, IST projects and results, for finding Russian and NIS partners for future projects of FP6 and CULTIVATE Russia, led by the British Council.
At the beginning of the 1990's, Russia was well behind Europe and North America in the field of 'Culture x Technology' - by some estimates 5 - 6 years. This gap has since been closed substantially and this is exemplified by EVA Moscow and the major annual Libraries Conference in the Crimea (over 1,000 participants).
Russia's great cultural heritage and now very lively cultural scene allied with strong technological skills indicate that Russia will make continuing progress - ideally with strong international partnerships as already shown by Russian current participation in the CULTIVATE Russia, EVA Networking and MUVII projects. In July 2002 two more EU projects with Russian participation starts, that is E-Culture Net and PULMAN XT. It is hoped that Russia will play a key role in the Sixth Framework Programme including working with EU partners to help other countries in the Newly Independent States e.g. Ukraine and new Central Asia States to become very involved in European-wide and international work in The Information Society and Technology in Culture.
Nadezhda V Brakker
The Centre for Informatization in the Sphere of Culture (Centre
PIC)
The 5th Magistralnaja ul, 5,
Moscow 123007,
Russia
URL: <http://www.evarussia.ru/>
Email: lku@artinfo.ru
Nadezhda Brakker, the main specialist of Centre PIC, graduated from the State Moscow University, Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics with post-graduate at the All-union Institute of Science and Technical Information. Nadezhda has worked in the area of information technologies in museums for 20 years, takes an active part in all the projects of Centre PIC and is responsible for research and international projects. Her interests and studies are concentrated on Internet resources in the cultural area, integration of regional information resources based on standards and meta-data, net knowledge bases and distance learning. Nadezhda was a speaker at EVA'96 London, EVA'97 Brussels, EVA'98 Cambridge, EVA'99 Florence, EVA2000 Edinburg, EVA2000 Gifu, EVA2001 Florence, Sphere (Helsinki 2001), e-MAL (Riga 2002) and is the secretary of the Organisation Committee of EVA'98 and EVA'99 Moscow and the Head of the Programme Committee of EVA2000, EVA2001 Moscow - the leading international event in Russia and East Europe. Nadezhda took the course Digital Cultural Heritage II at the Amsterdam-Maastricht Summer University in 2000. She is involved in European projects EVA Networking (EVAN), Cultivate-Russia, Multi-User Virtual Interactive Interface (MUVII).
Leonid A Kujbyshev
The Centre for Informatization in the Sphere of Culture (Centre
PIC)
The 5th Magistralnaja ul, 5,
Moscow 123007,
Russia
URL: <http://www.evarussia.ru/>
Email: lku@artinfo.ru
Leonid Kujbyshev, the chief of the Centre of Multimedia Technologies of Centre PIC, graduated from the Moscow Institute of Radio-electronics and worked on design, development and installation of automated documentation systems in the tourist business. From 1989 he was the chief of the software department of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR and since 1992, is a vice-director of Centre PIC. From 1994 he was the chief of the Centre of multimedia technologies and co-ordinates all multimedia projects of Centre PIC. Leonid is a member of the Russian branch of ICOMOS. He is one of the founders of the Union of multimedia publishers and is now interested mainly in the problems of "piracy", intellectual property and legislation in the sphere of multimedia. Leonid Kujbyshev studies and analyses Russian policy in Culture and Technologies, Russian Multimedia industry and Russian Internet resources on culture and art. Leonid was a speaker at EVA'96 London, EVA'97 Brussels, EVA'99 Florence, EVA2000 Edinburgh, EVA2000 Gifu, EVA2001 Berlin and the head of Organisation Committee of EVA'98, EVA'99, EVA2000, EVA2001 Moscow - the leading international event in Russia and East Europe. Involved in European projects EVAN, Cultivate-Russia, Multi-User Virtual Interaction Interface (MUVII).
The Centre for Informatization in the Sphere of Culture of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation (Centre PIC) [52] was organised in 1992 from personnel of the computer centre of the Ministry of Culture of the USSR, after the USSR was divided into independent states, to investigate new information technologies and applications in the cultural area. Centre PIC is a state research and design body subordinate to the Ministry of Culture of Russia and works under contracts with the Ministry of Culture of Russia, with the Ministry of Industry, Science and Technology of Russia and with Russian museums and other cultural institutions. In 1995 the Ministry of Culture of Russia organised 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. Centre PIC monitors and analyses new information and communication technologies in culture and art (in Russia and internationally) and presents annuals reports on the topic.
Centre PIC participates in the EU projects EVA Networking (EVAN), Cultivate-Russia, Multi-User Virtual Interaction Interface (MUVII).
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For citation purposes:
Brakker,N. and Kujbyshev,L. "The Information Society and Technology in Russia", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/istrussia/>
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By Les Grivell- November 2002
Les Grivell reports on the EU-funded ORIEL Project, a project focused on digital information management in the biosciences.
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Starting on 1st January 2002 and running for three years, the European Commission is funding ORIEL, a project focused on digital information management in the biosciences (Contract number IST-2001-32688). ORIEL (Online Research Information Environment for the Life Sciences) was formulated as a response to the need of biologists to deal with a growing stream of information generated by genomics, imaging and other data-intensive technologies. ORIEL aims to provide biological research communities with tools to manage large, complex, multimedia datasets and to navigate through an increasingly intricate and potentially confusing information landscape.
Writing in 1985 in a committee report for the US National Academy of Sciences, Morowitz argued that biological research had reached a point where "new generalizations and higher order biological laws are being approached, but may be obscured by the simple mass of data" [1]. His warning was perhaps at that time a little premature, but it has turned out to be truly prophetic. Biology is currently undergoing a revolution.
The development that probably has had most impact on research methodology and perspectives is Genomics. This young and rapidly expanding discipline focuses primarily on the determination and interpretation of the DNA sequences of the entire genetic blueprint (genome) of an organism. Genomics research is characterised by the production of vast amounts of raw and derived data obtained from high throughput technologies that include whole genome gene and protein analysis, systematic protein 3D-structure determination, and real time molecular and cellular imaging. Each of these areas shares a number of features:
To give some impression of the scale of the problem, as of 10th October 2002, the number of DNA sequences deposited in the combined international nucleotide sequence databanks formed by DDBJ (DNA Data Bank of Japan; CIB, Mishima, Japan), EMBL (EBI, Hinxton, UK) and GenBank (NCBI, Bethesda, USA) amounted to a staggering 29.9 gigabases in around 19.7 million records [2]. In 1985, the year of the Morowitz report, the total number of DNA sequence records in the EBI-EMBL nucleotide database was around 5000, while in 2001, the number of entries added to the database per day was around five times this number (see Figure 1 below).
 |
| Figure 1 : Exponential growth of DNA sequence data
held in the joint EMBL- GenBank-DDBJ databanks, with a number of landmarks in genomic sequencing |
The integration of the exponentially growing amounts of these data and associated information in the scientific literature is presenting one of the most demanding current challenges to both biologists and information technologists. It is as a response to this challenge to develop improved tools for information management that the ORIEL project [3] was conceived. ORIEL is an acronym for Online Research Information Environment in the Life Sciences. In architecture, an Oriel window is one that projects from an upper floor of a building. Such windows were popular in buildings of the late Gothic and Tudor periods and offered a particularly good view of their surroundings.
| Participant name | Role within the project |
|---|---|
| European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) http://www.embo.org/ |
Scientific and technical coordination, scientific quality control, integration of ORIEL research activities with the functionality of the E-BioSci platform |
| European Molecular Biology Laboratory - the European Bio-informatics Institute
(EMBL-EBI) http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ |
Expertise in bio-informatics and involvement in biological database and ontology development |
| University of Oxford (UOXF-AT) http://www.bioimage.org/ |
Development of The BioImage Database, its population with useful images and its integration with other biological information sources |
| Ingenta UK Ltd (Ingenta) http://www.ingenta.com/ |
Development of integration technologies and web-front ends for complex sites that integrate multiple distributed databases (including the BioImage database). Enhancement of the integration of diverse factual resources with traditional literature and abstracts databases |
| Centre Informatique National de l'Enseignement Supérieur (CINES) http://www.cines.fr/ |
Collaboration with LIRMM in the realisation of adaptive user interfaces; testing of software components and integrative activities preceding wider dissemination |
| Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Istituto di Tecnologie Biomediche Avanzate and Istituto di Biologia Cellulare (CNR-ITB and CNR-IBC) http://www.itba.mi.cnr.it/ http://www.emmanet.org/ |
Development of tools for gene analysis; integration of gene-mining applications with information retrieved from the scientific literature; implementation in live bioinformatics services, including the Resource database maintained by the CNR-IBC on behalf of the European Mutant Mouse Archive (EMMA) |
| International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Technology (ICGEB) http://www.icgeb.trieste.it/ |
Bioinformatics expertise; development of gene analysis applications and their integration with other tools developed within the project; delivery as service to the research community |
| Centro Nacional de Biotecnologia (CNB-CSIC) http://www.pdg.cnb.uam.es/ |
Bioinformatics expertise; application of information extraction technology to the mining of biological information in text repositories |
| Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microélectronique de Montpellier (LIRMM) http://www.lirmm.fr/ |
Development of tools for creation and editing of ontologies and collaborative browsing of information resources |
| Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) http://www.inria.fr/ |
Construction of a core of well-defined XML specifications for the dissemination of biological data |
| Institut de Génétique Humaine UPR CNRS1142 (IGH) http://www.igh.cnrs.fr/ |
Data evolution and transformation using XSLT; Application of XQUERY to the querying of XML biological data |
With EMBO, the European Molecular Biology Organisation, as coordinator, the project combines the skills of a number of partner institutions and organisations in Europe (Table 1), with focus on development of:
Individual components of the project consist of:
A unique feature of the ORIEL project is its degree of integration with the E-BioSci initiative [9] that is funded by the EC as a research infrastructure under its Quality of Life Programme (contract no. QLRI-CT-2001-30266). The E-BioSci platform aims to provide services that will help biologists to find and bring together many different kinds of digital information. It will focus primarily on interlinkage between genomics-related, image and molecular datasets and the relevant research literature, implementing novel technologies for retrieval as these become available. Given the complexity of the biological knowledge base, solutions to many of the issues involved will require significant research effort. ORIEL will play an important role in focusing and inputting such effort during this developmental process. Conversely, the E-BioSci platform will offer ORIEL partners opportunity for rigorous testing of prototype toolkits and other project components in a controlled, live environment, with critical feedback from selected groups of test users.
As mentioned in the introduction to this brief overview, biology is undergoing a revolution. Driven by advances in technology and huge amounts of new information, this revolution is dramatically changing the way in which researchers formulate and test concepts and make their experimental data known to the research community. The tools developed within ORIEL will help biologists meet the challenge of turning these data into useful knowledge.
Les Grivell
ORIEL Project Coordinator
European Molecular Biology Organisation
Meyerhofstrasse 1
69117 Heidelberg
Germany
URL: <http://www.oriel.org/>
URL: <http://www.e-biosci.org/>
Email: les.grivell@embo.org
Phone: +49 6221 889 1501
Fax: +49 6221 889 1210
Les Grivell is manager of EMBO's Electronic Information Programme and coordinates both ORIEL and E-BioSci projects.
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For citation purposes:
Grivell, L. "The ORIEL Project - biological information management from a new perspective", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/oriel/>
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By Natalia N.Fedianina - November 2002
Natalia Fedianina provides us with an overview of the state of ICT development in her home region. She provides encouraging news of progress made, but also examines the challenges facing digital cultural heritage professionals in and around Smolensk. She helps us to see the progress her region has made in informatisation; a term, she assures me, commonly used in Russian official circles to denote the process of development and introduction of information and communication technologies to any sphere of activity.
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At present less than half of all cultural organisations have an email address. Many do not understand the uses of the Internet nor what the e-culture is.
But the situation is changing rapidly. Technologies are being developed, communication facilities are being improved, attitudes at official level are also changing and that is reflected in the money available for informatisation. The activities of the professional digital heritage community are having a big influence on the introduction of IT to the whole cultural sector. The most influential events for this community are the annual EVA and ADIT conferences.
What is really going on now in Russia in the sphere of ICT and culture? What information projects and programs are happening in the provinces? This article provides a snapshot of the situation in the Smolensk region.
 |
| Figure 1: A view of Smolensk |
A major characteristic of the Smolensk region is its frontier location on the western borders of Russia, at an important transit point on the main Western Europe-Moscow highway. The region borders with the Moscow region in the east and with Byelorussia in the west. As such the region is notable for its very close mixture of western and Russian culture.
The Smolensk region is a part of the Central Federal District. It occupies 49,786 sq. km (0,29% of all Russian territory). In July 2002 the population of the region stood at 1.098 million people, of whom more than 30% (350,000) live in Smolensk [1]. The average monthly wage of the working population has increased by 38% during the last year to US$105. The average income for all inhabitants in the region is $82.
Smolensk, the regional centre, is one of the most ancient Russian towns. It is believeed that the town was probably founded in 863 A.D. when it was first mentioned in records. Smolensk is noted for its historical and cultural heritage. In this respect only Novgorod, Pskov and Vladimir come close.
Officially the region has 3,963 historic and cultural monuments of which 222 have the status "of federal value" [2]. Among the most famous monuments are the Gnezdovo barrows and monuments of pre-Mongolian period architecture - the 12th Century churches - of Michael Archangel, of Peter and Paul, and of Ioann Bogoslov. Smolensk also has a unique architectural monument and one of the biggest fortresses in the world in the Smolensk fortress (1596-1602) and an art symbol of the town - the Uspensky Cathedral (17-18th century). Among the famous sons of Smolensk are Michael Glinka, Sergey Konenkov, Izek Azimov, Yuri Gagarin, Nicolai Przheval'sky, Alexander Tvardovsky, Yuri Nikulin.
The region has an advanced museum network which includes one of the largest museum associations in Russia - Smolensk State Museum-Reserve, two other regional museums and 24 municipal museums. The library network totals over 600 libraries, with book stocks of about 8.7 million [2]. The main library is the Smolensk Regional Universal Library which actively uses new methods and is among the most advanced in Russia. The Smolensk Universal Library set up the first library legal centre in Russia and has a German-French reading room and a Multimedia Centre.
More than 30 state archival establishments comprise the archival system of the region. They have about two million storage units of documents on the history of Smolensk province from the 18th Century to the present. The main archives are the State Archive of Smolensk region, the Centre for the Documentation of the Recent History of the Smolensk Region and the State Archive of Staff Documents.
The chief problem in the regional telecommunications field is that of a market monopoly. Today in Smolensk only one organisation, the Smolensksvjazinform Company, provides local and long-distance connections. This situation is not competitive. As a result, service costs for consumers are high. By some estimates the monopoly's share in the regional telecommunications market is anything between 60 and 94.3% [3].
14 operators provide such services, one of them, the Smolensksvjazinform Company, is long-standing, the others are new. The new entrants' share in the local telecommunications market is insignificant - about 4 %. The annual increase in telephony is of the order of 15-20,000 new phone numbers. Today there are 68.67 phones per 100 households in the Smolensk region, in the city of Smolensk - 71.16 phones per 100, whilst in the countryside - 27.51 [4].
The number of mobile telephone users now exceeds 60,000, about 5.5 % of the population. This figure is higher than the Russian average. In 2000-2001 the number of subscribers more than doubled. In the mobile phone market 5 operators are currently active and provide services to the following standards -GSM 900/1800, NMT-450 and AMPS [4]. The leading companies are the Smolensk branch of MTS (Mobile Telesystems) and Beeline-GSM Smolensk.
The Internet is one of most rapidly developing services of the telecommunications market in the region. Annually the number of Internet users increases several times over and had reached 7000 by March 2002 [4]. There are two ISPs: Smolensksvjazinform and Smolensk Teleport. There are two Internet-cafés in Smolensk. Public Internet access centres have been created in libraries, high schools, colleges and universities. Regional and municipal post offices have begun installing Internet access points since the first quarter of 2002.
| Telecommunications development in Smolensk region by the years: | 2000 | 2005 | 2010 | 2015 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number of phones in thousands and density in per cent (%) | 220 | 20% | 300 | 27% | 430 | 39% | 600 | 54% |
| Number of mobile phones in thousands and density in per cent (%) | 12 | 1% | 30 | 3% | 100 | 9% | 300 | 33% |
| Number of Internet users in thousands and density in per cent (%) | 2 | 0.2% | 22 | 2% | 88 | 8% | 220 | 20% |
The regional authorities' policy supports informatisation development. There is a special Committee on Information Resources and Telecommunications for the Smolensk region that works in this area. The basic programs regulating activity in this sphere are "The Program for the Informatisation of the Smolensk Region up to 2005" and "The Legal informatisation of the Smolensk Region up to 2005". The scope of the programs in the region is wide, involving libraries, museums, and local governmental and educational institutions in the process of uniform information space creation.
A good example of what the program has achieved is the integrated regional system based on Internet/Intranet technologies that supplies information to and allows interaction between the government, municipal authorities, enterprises and organisations. Centres for on-line access to the regional Intranet network have been created in libraries, schools and colleges (915 centres connected to date). Also legal information centres have been established in rural libraries and work has begun on the electronic union catalogue of Smolensk libraries [1].
Within the framework of these programs the Committee on Information Resources and Telecommunications organises and supports numerous annual events to promote ICT in various fields of regional activity including:
ICT issues in culture and informational cultural centres are two of the priority areas of "The Program for the Development of Culture in the Smolensk Region for 2001-2005". Key events connected with IT and promoting the creation of e-cultural resources are reflected in the following sections.
The Smolensk Museum-Reserve is the largest regional cultural establishment that has a significant technical base, staff experienced in IT and good connections with culture organisations in the Smolensk region and throughout Russia. Since May 2001 the Museum-Reserve has been implementing the Corporate Resource Centre "Culture" Program which supports culture organisations and aims to establish a uniform informational and cultural space in the region on the basis of the application of ICT.
The centre concentrates on the active use of IT. Its primary goals are to develop corporate informational resources - corporate in the sense of creation and use, to promote information exchange between cultural organisations, both at the regional and national levels, and to contribute to interaction between them.
There are two departments in the Resource Centre structure, the Information Service and the Web Studio. The Information Service promotes Smolensk cultural heritage through provision of content, archiving Internet-resources and publication and distribution of the weekly e-newsletter. The Web Studio works on cultural internet-projects and makes CD-Roms and web pages. Besides the Resources Centre "Culture" Program, the Smolensk Museum-Reserve is, for example, a participant in the Russian national node of the Cultivate Network. It also provided the regional centre for organising "Automation of museums and information technologies" (ADIT). In 2001 the Smolensk region took third place in Russia in an inter-museum information exchange (the server "Museums of Russia" www.museum.ru) due to the high quality of ICT services of the museum.
On 9 June 1998 the first public centre for legal information in Russia was opened in Smolensk by the Regional Universal Library [5]. So far, during the first 4 years of the Program "Legal Informatisation of the Smolensk Region up to 2005", an Intranet network of 136 centres of legal information has been created, including 22 centres in libraries. The creation of such centres not only allowed the widening of the spectrum of services offered by libraries, but also became the basic source of computer equipment maintenance for libraries. The legal centres in libraries have free access to the Internet with regulated volume of the traffic through the Internet server of the regional administration. Thus libraries also gain the opportunity for external information exchange in the Internet network and the internal regional Intranet network.
Financial support for setting up legal information centres in libraries comes from two sources, the regional budget and non-budget sources. Budgetary funds are distributed by means of the annual regional competition "The Library is the Centre for Legal Information" organised by regional authorities. Annually three libraries receive computer equipment as a result of the competition.
On 6 April 2001 the first multimedia centre in Russia was opened in the Smolensk Regional Universal Library, in the art literature department. Staff of the centre digitise audio archives and so preserve them and provide access to archival materials. Until recently access to the rich audio stock of the library (more than 14,000 gramophone records) was restricted. The record archive was formed in the mid-1960's and has been in active use ever since. However a gramophone record tends to wear out if it is played more than fifty times. Now the problem of access to the audio stock has been solved. 4,000 soundtracks of Russian and foreign classics have been digitised so far.
The program for digitising the music, photo and video stocks was provided by the company Amkor-Electronix (Smolensk). The system developed by the company permits publication through the Internet and can easily be adapted for commercial use. In the near future the library plans to make available the electronic audio catalogue and a bibliographic database on the Intranet network of regional administration [6].
The Internet site Smolensk Libraries On-Line [7] was created within the framework of the educational and informational centre "Smolensk Libraries". This project is the responsibility of the Smolensk Humanitarian University together with the Committee on information resources and telecommunications of the Smolensk region with financial support from the "Project Harmony Inc." organisation. The main objectives of the project are to create an information portal for Smolensk libraries, give them an access to the wide-area internet network, link their electronic resources and catalogues and create a basis for the creation of methodological seminars and courses on Internet use in library work. Currently the project internet site enables users to search the catalogue for books in the library of the Smolensk Humanitarian University. Through the project, librarians of high schools and university libraries are trained to create library Web sites, library databases and also in Web design.
"Smolensk in the memory of centuries" is the theme of the annual regional Web design competition. Its objective is to raise young people's awareness of the history and culture of Russia and of Smolensk in particular. It also introduces information technologies and the use of the Internet into the sphere of education. The competition is organised by the Committee on Information Resources and Telecommunications of the Smolensk Region together with the Committee on Youth and the Committee on Education [1].
The competition subject varies each year, but is always connected to regional culture and history. For example in 2002 it was devoted to the 200th anniversary of the birth of the eminent Russian admiral P.Nahimov and to the 400th anniversary of the Smolensk fortress. Regional high schools, colleges, organisations, universities and individual students are eligible to participate. The quality of projects and the professionalism of participants increases every year. Some Web sites created within the competition framework were even included in the basic regional Internet portals and thus increasing the exposure of Smolensk culture to the Internet audience.
NB:All Internet resources listed are in Russian. The review does not include the sites devoted to individual creativity.
| Name of the Internet resource | Address |
|---|---|
| Internet catalogues | |
| Catalogue of the Smolensk region Internet-resources | http://www.smolensk.ru/kat.shtml |
| "Smolensk On-Line" catalogue | http://www.smolensk-online.ru/ |
| Smolensk in network / culture and art | http://www.infosmolensk.ru/gorod/rubriks/smol_resurs2.htm |
| Culture news | |
| Basic news portal of the Smolensk region | http://news.smolensk.ru/ |
| Culture news in "Smolensk vestnik" | http://vestnik.smolensk-online.ru/cgi-bin/index.cgi?folder=3 |
| Smolensk exhibitions | http://admin.smolensk.ru/~muz_zap/vist/kultur.htm |
| Posters | http://admin.smolensk.ru/kultura/afisha.htm |
| Leisure in Smolensk | http://dosug.smolensk.ru/ |
| Musical Smolensk | http://www.music.infosmolensk.ru/ |
| Libraries | |
| Smolensk Regional Universal Library | http://www.smolensk.ru/user/lib/ |
| Smolensk Humanitarian University Library | http://library.shu.ru/ |
| Museums | |
| Smolensk State Museum-Reserve (under reconstruction) | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/muzey/Title.htm |
| Museum-Reserve "Khmelita" | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/hmelitaa.html |
| Isakovskiy's Memorial Museum | http://www.sci.smolensk.ru/isakov/index.html |
| State Memorial Complex "Katyn" | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/katyn/index.html |
| Brief guidance on Smolensk museums | http://dosug.smolensk.ru/show.shtml |
| Projects and programs | |
| "Smolensk through centuries" - project of the Smolensk Museum-Reserve | http://www.smz.smolensk.ru/ |
| Opening of the Smolensk Regional Corporate Resources Centre "Culture" | http://admin.smolensk.ru/~muz_zap/krc/ |
| Smolensk Libraries On-Line | http://library.smolensk-online.ru/ |
| Cultural tourism | http://admin.smolensk.ru/~muz_zap/turizm/ |
| Public-scientific readings devoted to Yuri Gagarin | http://www.sci.smolensk.ru/users/gread/ |
| Creativity | |
| Smolensk Union of Artists | http://smolensk-art.keytown.com/ |
| Smolensk Russian National Orchestra of V.P.Dubrovskiy | http://dubrovsky.keytown.com/ |
| Chamber Chorus "Smolensk" | http://www.smolensk.ru/user/chorus/rus/index.htm |
| Michael Vandyshev's photostudio | http://www.sci.smolensk.ru/users/mv/ |
| "The Sun" Children's choreographic ensemble | http://www.admin.smolensk.ru/kultura/SUNNY/index.html |
| Others | |
| Calendar of Smolensk memorial dates | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/kalendar/date.htm |
| Cultural values of the Smolensk region - Talashkino | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/web-cn.htm |
| The historical annals | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/kep/Smolensk/history/index.html |
| The stone annals of Smolensk | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/C/ind-c.htm |
| Eminent natives | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/B1/index.html |
| Merkury of Smolensk | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/mercury/index.htm |
| Virtual excursion round Smolensk | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/kep/Smolensk/monuments/index.htm |
| "Star Road" - site devoted to the first cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin | http://admin.smolensk.ru/history/gagarin/gagarin.htm |
This dramatically affects the availability of computer equipment in cultural organisations and causes lack of IT expertise to be a problem for staff. For the moment, the only solution is to attract additional non-budget sources to support special programs and projects.
There are not many relevant Web sites, and only a few of them are professionally produced. For financial reasons, cultural organisations prefer to avoid professional designers and usually turn to individual students or educational institutions instead.
This leads to a lack of both stable funding and coordination. In most cases "memory organisations" use their own software for digitising which can cause many problems, such as compatibility of the data, description standards etc. Nonetheless there are effective, but expensive digitising systems on the Russian software market (for example, the museum program "CAMIS 2000", developed by the Alt-Soft Company).
Basically access is provided through a local server or the internal Intranet network of the region.
It is difficult to find resources about the culture of the Russian regions in English or any other foreign language. The Karelia region is a happy exception to this rule.
These are being provided by regional companies at very high cost. As mentioned above, the telecommunications monopoly in the regional market is the main cause for dissatisfaction.
This absence means that cultural resources are very fragmented and it is difficult to form an overview of what is happening in the region and to find specific information.
Most sites are on Internet portals of the regional administration or an Internet service provider and have a third or fourth level address.
Natalia N.Fedianina
Head of the Information Department
Smolensk State Museum-Reserve
Regional Coordinator of Cultivate-Russia
B.Sovetskaya, 11,
Smolensk, 214000,
Russia
Email: natalia.fedianina@msses.ru
Phone: + 7 8122 37346
Fax: + 7 8122 37346
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For citation purposes:
Fedianina, N.N., "A Russian Province: ICT and culture in the Smolensk region", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/smolensk/>
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By Alistair Edwards - November 2002
Alistair Edwards gives advice on public speaking - bearing in mind that not everyone in the audience may be able to see your slides or hear you speak.
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You turn up for your talk. You have carefully prepared your slides (following Brian Kelly's advice [1]). In fact you are rather pleased with their design and the way they will support and illustrate your talk. You have made sure that they work on the equipment supplied and you are all ready to go. And then you notice… There is a dog lying by one of the seats on the front row, and this is not just any dog, it is a guide dog. There is a blind man in your audience. He is not going to appreciate your slides; he is not even going to be able to see them.
What do you do? Should you forget about using your slides all together? This article presents some advice on preparing and giving talks bearing in mind that it is quite likely that not everyone in the audience will be able to see or hear as well as you might otherwise assume.
Well, the first advice is: Don't Panic. (Echoing both Brian Kelly and Douglas Adams!) Of course, the best thing to do is anticipate this eventuality before the day of the talk, when you are preparing it, and having read this article, that will presumably be the case.
You should not discard your slides, or prepare a talk without them. While you might fear that it could seem an insult to use them when at least one person in the room will get nothing from them, you should still prepare slides and you will use them. The point is to think in advance what are the slides for and how you are going to use them.
There are usually two main reasons for using slides. The first one is that they act as an aide memoire to yourself as the speaker. You have defined a structure for your talk and that is embodied in the slides. Furthermore, each slide will help you to remember what you wanted to say on that topic. Clearly this role is unaffected by the presence of the blind audience member.
The second role is to help the audience follow the talk. They will also get to see the structure and will have visual reinforcement of whatever you are saying. Of course the blind audience member will not get that benefit. For him, therefore, having a clear structure will help him to follow and you can help with explicit signposting. So don't assume everyone has read each slide (it sounds obvious - but you'd be surprised...) For instance, if you move to a new topic, you may have a slide with a title for that topic. Show the slide - but accompany it with a suitable cue: 'Moving now to...'
Some slides carry more important graphical information that is difficult to present in another way. Don't leave those out either. You should again think about the purpose of the slide and give at least a summary of its contents. For instance, if you were showing the following pie chart,
 |
| Figure 1: Example of graphical information, a pie |
| chart showing the proportion of the population |
| aged 45-54 who have physical disabilities |
you might say, 'This pie chart shows the proportion of the population aged 45-54 who have a non-severe physical limitation, represented by the red wedge at 17%; those 6% with a severe physical limitation in blue, and the majority with no recognized limitation'. This would be preferable to 'There is a white circle with a blue segment and a red segment in the upper left quadrant. The red segment is about three times as big as the blue one...' Think before you point, too. In this example you would not say, 'This segment represents people with a non-severe physical limitation, and this one those with a severe limitation,' leaving your blind listener guessing as to the relative sizes.
When I had a research student who was blind and other students would be giving seminars, I would remind them in advance that there would be at least one person in the audience who would not be able to see their slides and invariably they would say afterwards that their talk had gone much better than usual because they had thought about their slides. They knew that they could not stand pointing at a slide. Instead they had to think about what the slide was really meant to convey. If it was too complex to describe, then it was probably too complex visually for all the audience.
At the beginning of your talk you should acknowledge the fact that there is someone in the audience who will not see your slides and you can reassure them that you will be describing the content of your slides. Don't be embarrassed to mention it.
What is the most stupid sentence to start a talk with? 'Can you hear me at the back?' Presumably anyone who cannot hear will not be able to answer, and there may be people in the audience (not even at the back) who cannot hear you - because they have a hearing impairment. In this instance the most important thing to remember is to use any amplification that is provided. Speakers often seem shy about using microphones and amplification. They will say 'I don't need that', and try to project their voice around the room. Yet most microphones are not simply connected to the public address system. They are often part of a 'loop' or other transmitter that can be picked up by people's hearing aids. Using the microphone does not just mean that your voice is amplified in the room, but can provide an almost direct connection to any hearing aid users.
So, if you find it uncomfortable to hear your own voice amplified - practise. Get used to it and then next time you are giving a public presentation, you will use it without further thought, to the benefit of everyone, including any hearing-impaired people.
Some deaf people lip-read. They will probably sit at the front and you can help them by making your mouth movements more apparent. That does not mean speaking slowly and loudly with exaggerated lip movements, but rather:
What if the 'stranger' in the room is not a guide dog, but a sign language interpreter? Again, preparation is the best approach. Ideally the interpreter should have advanced warning about what you are going to talk about. Give them notes or copies of your slides or whatever you have - and as far in advance as possible. That way they have an idea of the vocabulary involved and can be prepared. Most signs in sign language represent words or concepts, but if your talk is very technical and involves a lot of jargon, signs may not exist for those words. In that case, the signer will have to fingerspell the word. This is much slower than signing, and, again it helps if the signer has the word written down in advance so they know what they are spelling.
Cutting down on jargon and presenting it slowly and clearly can help, but otherwise it is probably best to try to ignore the presence of signers. In other words, talk to your audience and resist the temptation to speak to signers or to periodically check with them that they have been able to translate each portion.
Much of my research is concerned with making computers more accessible to people with disabilites. A frequent observation in this kind of work is that when you make it easier for (say) a blind person to use something, that improves the design for all users. So it is with public speaking. If your talk is prepared such that a blind or a deaf person can understand and appreciate it, you will probably find that the rest of the audience also understood it better too.
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Alistair Edwards
Senior Lecturer
Department of Computer Science
University of York
Heslington
York
YO10 5DD
United Kingdom
URL:<http://www-users.ac.uk/~alistair/>
Email: alistair@cs.york.ac.uk
Phone: +44 1904 432775
Alistair Edwards is a lecturer at the University of York. He has a long-standing research interest in accommodating the needs of people with disabilities in human-computer interfaces.
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For citation purposes:
Edwards, A. "Giving Presentations with Accessibility in Mind", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/accessibility/>
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By Geri Gay and Angela Spinazze - November 2002
Dr.Geri Gay, Angela Spinazze and Michael Stefanone write about the research being undertaken in the Handscape Project which is focusing upon potential use scenarios for mobile (hand-held) computing in museums. Further material on Handscape is available on its recent symposium.
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Handscape is a research project funded by Intel Corporation and conducted by CIMI and the Human Computer Interaction Group (HCI) at Cornell University [1]. The project is concerned with exploring potential use scenarios for mobile (hand-held) computing in museums.
The project takes as its focus the value of mobile computing - the ability to be on-line while roaming without having to interrupt the applications that use the network - for enriching the visitor's experience of a museum. The objective is to investigate how visitors can be affected before, during and after the museum visit and the resulting impact on the design of such services.
The initial hypothesis is that mobile technologies present an opportunity to evolve radically the way museums relate and communicate with visitors and that new applications and services designed for these devices can positively influence the visitor experience.
The Handscape project began with a needs assessment as a means to ensure a holistic approach to understanding both the technological development and the implementation of mobile computing in museums. The goal of the assessment was to identify and articulate conceptual differences between three groups of stakeholders: application designers, museum visitors, and museum administrators.
An on-line concept mapping exercise was used to generate an expansive list of specific expectations for the technology (statement generation) and to present the relationship of these expectations to each other in a spatial form (statement structuring). Over 100 individuals participated in the exercise including software application designers, educators, museum patrons (from teen to retirement age), and museum administrators (chief information officers, information technology managers, technical support staff and others).
Participants were asked to structure the statements by grouping them by conceptual similarity, and labelling those groups. The second step was to rank each statement based on its perceived importance. Cluster analysis and multi-dimensional scaling procedures were applied to the resulting similarity matrices, yielding the following concept map containing key aspects, or concepts, which emerged from the on-line brainstorming session.
 |
| Figure 1: Cluster Map |
Each cluster contains individual statements relating to an idea. For further discussion, and a detailed list of statements found in each conceptual cluster, a phase one report is available [2]. Participants rated each of the clusters in the concept map based on perceived importance, as well. The diagram below is a comparison between aggregate rating results among the three stakeholder groups: Museum Patrons, System/Interface Designers, and Museum Administrators.
 |
| Figure 2: Comparison between aggregate rating results among 3 stakeholder groups |
The analysis of the concept mapping exercise reveals an affinity of expectations between the designer and visitor groups. Upon closer examination, the statements associated with the terms identifying the cluster statements reveal quite interesting insights. For example, the term Interface (the label chosen for one of the clusters) refers not only to ease of use but, to personalisation; Location refers not only to knowing where one is at a given time but also to revisiting all movements that occurred in a single visit; and Artist Information refers not only to contextual placement of an object within historical and social frameworks but also the presentation of this information to the visitor through the use of multiple media such as digital audio and video.
Once the perceptions of these initial stakeholder groups were measured, three culturally different museums participated in a similar exercise (Phase Two). The American Museum of the Moving Image [3], The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London [4] , and the Field Museum, Chicago [5], were invited to participate in this second phase for a number of reasons, including the fact that they had experience developing and implementing a mobile computing application within the twelve months preceding the start of the project. The museums involved in Phase Two function as case studies highlighting the cultural importance of individual museum contexts.
Team members involved with the development and deployment of the mobile application in each museum completed an online survey through which they executed the same statement ranking exercise described above.
The results from Phase Two reveal that the most important issues to technically experienced museum professionals, relate to the Interface conceptual cluster. Statements falling into this conceptual cluster include "the ability to customise the tour to match my interests", "a customisable interface", "an interface I can learn within 30 seconds". These statements make it clear that future testing and evaluation of mobile computing applications in museums must focus on minimising the learning curve user's face when presented with a mobile system, and optimisation of the match between user expectations and user experience with mobile platforms. Given the complex, dynamic nature of social/interpersonal communication, which should continue to be a goal of museum spaces, it is clear that emphasis should be placed on human factors issues.
Other categories (Artist, Museum Information) relate to existing information dissemination responsibilities museums face today. While others, such as Messaging suggest new ways for visitors to experience the museum. Statements included in the Messaging cluster, such as "the ability to send messages to your friends in different parts of the museum", "share the content from my museum experience with others who may be interested", "suggestions of other pieces I would like based on my input", support the idea of communication between visitors and between visitors and the museum worthy of further attention.
The complete set of concept clusters and results are presented below:
 |
| Figure 3: Phase Two comparison of perceived levels of importance of concepts between groups |
At first glance, it appears that there is not much in common across these three institutional perspectives; a closer look at the statements and their rankings reveals an affinity across three key areas. Interface - the effective use of inherent features and functionality of the mobile device to offer the visitor a personalised experience; Messaging - the ability to use the device to promote social interaction within the museum environment; Functionality - a strategic approach to deployment of hand-held devices in the museum so that they serve a purpose and are not just another random technology.
Phase Two participants were also asked to rank a set of potential use scenarios in order of their likelihood to enhance a museum visitor's experience. The scenarios are listed in the ranked order (the first scenario, participants believe to be most likely to enhance the museum visitor experience, and the last the least likely to enhance the visitor's experience).
PDA is equipped with location-sensitive data, which is presented depending on proximity to specific exhibit, enabling visitor to:
Pre-museum visit planning, enabling visitors to download museum exhibit information via Internet (any location) and:
Museum-maintained wireless PDA fleet, enabling visitors to:
During museum visit, small groups synchronise PDAs, enabling visitors to share screens, content and:
A number of issues have emerged from this first year that we regard as needing further attention in order to understand better the potential use of models for mobile computing in the museum environment. The issues of particular interest to CIMI and HCI include:
Over the next twenty-four months, our investigations will involve testing innovative scenarios in two different museum environments, an outdoor space at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London and an indoor space at the Renwick Gallery [6] in partnership with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In addition, we will continue to cultivate relationships within the museum community through the project WhiteSite [7], the public list serve, and visits to institutions implementing similar solutions involving interviews with staff responsible for these projects and observations of visitors using the devices.
Dr. Geri Gay
Director, Human-Computer Interaction Group
Cornell University
Ithaca
New York 14853
USA
URL: <http://www.hci.cornell.edu>
Email: gkg1@cornell.edu
(with contributions by Michael Stefanone, PhD student, and
Emily Posner, undergraduate).
Dr.Geri Gay is director of the Human-Computer Interaction Group (HCI Group) and an associate professor of communication at Cornell University. The HCI Group is a research and development group whose members design and research the use of computer-mediated learning environments. Dr.Gay's research interests focus on cognitive and social issues for the design and use of interactive communication technologies. Past research has explored navigation issues, knowledge management, mental models and metaphors, knowledge representations, collaborative work and learning, and system design.
Dr.Gay has received funding for her research and design projects from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Mellon Foundation, Intel, GE Foundation, IBM, Getty, and several private donors. She teaches courses in interactive multimedia design and research, computer mediated communication, human-computer interaction, and the social design of communication systems.
Angela Spinazze
Consultant
3270 N. Lake Shore Drive, Suite 5E
Chicago
Illinois 60657
USA
Tel: +1 773 281 5563
Fax: +1 773 442 7100
URL: <http://www.atspin.com>
Email: ats@atspin.com
Angela Spinazze has worked within the cultural heritage community since 1986. Her consulting focuses on informatics and content architecture- related issues. She has worked with clients on issues including knowledge management, digital libraries, mobile computing, strategic planning and implementation of new technologies, integrated access to collections and related research and virtual (Web-based) collections, process re-engineering, data migration, and visual literacy. Most recently, she has been involved with the Este Court Archive, a Culture 2000 Project to provide unified access to the dispersed collections amassed by the Este Family during the Renaissance. She is also working with The University of Notre Dame and its investigation of developing a digital visual resources collection. She also works with CIMI as manager of the Handscape Project.
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For citation purposes:
Gay, G., Spinazze, A. and Stefanone, M. "Handscape: Exploring potential use scenarios for mobile computing in museums", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/handscape/>
-------------------------------------------------------------
By Brian Kelly - November 2002
The Web is all about linking. Authors of Web pages normally provide links to other Web resources. But should permission be sought before doing this? Can creating a link to a public document on the Web even be illegal? Brian Kelly considers the matter.
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When you create a public Web site you will normally include links to other Web sites. Similarly you will expect others to link to you. This rich linking which leads to a "web" of related resources is a fundamental aspect of the World Wide Web. The Web grew so rapidly because it was so easy to develop HTML pages and to include links.
Despite the widespread culture of linking freely Web resources we are now seeing instances of organisations which require permission to be granted before links can be made to the organisation's Web site. Why is this happening? Should you seek permission before linking to a resource? Should you develop a linking policy for your own Web site and request that third parties seek permission before linking to your Web site? Should you even attempt to enforce such a policy?
The Web would never have succeeded in becoming such a successful global communications medium if permission to link to resources were needed. Users expect to be able to follow links between Web sites and page authors expect to create such links with the minimum of fuss.
Links to resources help to drive visitors to Web sites and without such links users would find it difficult to find resources and many Web sites would lose the traffic they require in order to fulfil their function. The business model for many Web sites is based on the numbers of visitors they receive. Indeed there are a number of companies which exist in order to generate traffic to Web sites by creating artificial links.
As well as providing hypertext linking another feature of the Web from its original conception was the use of URLs to identify a resource. The aim was to allow users to access a resource directly, in an application-independent way: the Web was designed to avoid the need to give users potentially complex or lengthy navigational routes to resources (e.g. Go to my home page. Then look at the table of contents on the right. Select the third link down. Follow this link. On the new page there are over five hundred further links. Find the one with the title The Answer To Life The Universe and Everything. This is the resource you are looking for.).
As documented by the Don't Link To Us Web site [1] an increasing number of Web sites appear to be implementing policies which require permission before links can be added or restrict the resources to which links can be made.
Several arguments have been made to justify this approach:
The term "deep linking" has been used to describe linking to resources which are located within a Web site, other than on the Web site entry point (or "home page" as an entry point is commonly referred to). In his Alertbox column in March 2002 Jakob Nielsen argued that "Deep Linking is Good Linking" [2].
Eric Hellman's LinkOpenly article provides examples of "Linking Custom and Etiquette" [3] which aimed to address some of the concerns over potential linking abuses, such as the need to ensure that links are labelled accurately; to provide text or visual cues to indicate where a user will be going; to avoid linking to content from another site in a frameset or linking to a graphical resource directly.
Deep linking is concerned with traditional HTML links to resources on a Web site. There are a number of approaches to linking which can be used which may not normally be considered to be "deep linking" but which should be considered as the policy issues are still relevant. These include:
As the Web develops richer forms of hyperlinking technologies are being developed. For example XLink and XPointer will provide a richer form of hyperlinking (e.g. links which are activated on user action or when the document is loaded, links which replace the current document, are embedded inline within the current document or are displayed in a new window) and the ability to process portions of a resource [4].
A lively debate is taking place on deep linking and related linking policy issues. Different communities have very different perspectives. Slashdot [5] is an online forum which is very popular with the software development community. Linking policies was the subject of a recent debate on Slashdot [6], following the establishment of the "Don't Link To Us!" Web site [7] which provides information on sites with restrictive link policies (and was reviewed in a CNET News.com article [8]). Predictably the debate on Slashdot was overwhelmingly against restrictive linking policies.
As may be expected the legal profession has a different view! An article on "Linking and Liability" [9] has reviewed a number of legal concerns with linking, including derivative works; plagiarism by passing off someone else's materials as one's own; defamation; trademark infringement and problems with frames. An ABCNews.com article on "Testing the Links" [10] reported on a court case brought in San Francisco in which "Les Kelly, a professional photographer, brought a case against the Arriba Corp., then-owners of Ditto.com, a visual search engine that catalogues photos from the Web. Kelly argued that by showing his work on its site, Ditto.com had violated his copyrights and damaged his ability to sell them over the Web". The court "found the 'in-line' linking style used by Ditto.com - in which a new browser window displayed each Kelly photo within the standard Ditto.com layout, and contained the same advertising as the Ditto.com site - was illegal because it could fool viewers into thinking they were still on the Ditto.com site."
Further information on Internet linking legal issues is available from the Linking Law section in Google [11]. One document worthy of note is "LinkLaw Revisited: Internet Linking Law At Five Years" [12].
The techies tell us one thing, the lawyers something else. How should we react, both as authors of Web resources which will contain links to others and owners of resources which we may wish to protect.
A defensive approach would be to have a linking policy which insisted that people wishing to link to you obtained permission first. However this has many disadvantages: people are unlikely to take notice of your request (unless you attempt to enforce that policy by configuring your Web server so that links from pages held on sites for which approval had not been obtained would be redirected to an alternative resource); you will have to provide resources to respond to people who do make a request; resources on your Web site will be more difficult to find (especially by search engines which rank resources based on the numbers of links, such as Google); traffic to your Web site will decrease; users will find it difficult to navigate to resources from your home page and you (and your organisation)will be criticised for going against the ethos of the Web and, for educational organisations, it will be argued that you are discouraging citation.
Should you seek permission before linking to another site? Common sense tells us that this is not a scaleable solution. Strictly permission is required before forwarding an email message. However, in practice, most email users will take a pragmatic view and will forward messages to other users or lists if they feel this is likely to cause no harm, but would seek permission if the email message was felt to be confidential.
The following suggestions are made which aim to provide a pragmatic solution on linking policies.
Cultivate Interactive has published a policy document [13] which covers our link policies, together with piolicies on the continuation of the Cultivate Interactive Web site once the funding has finished.
Of course it should be pointed out that IANAL - I am not a lawyer!
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Email: b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus. He works for
UKOLN
which is based at the
University of Bath
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For citation purposes:
Kelly, B. "Can I Link To Your Site?", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/link-policies/>
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By Ben Challis - November 2002
Ben Challis reports on a non-visual approach to presenting music notation for blind music learners. Weasel is an audio-tactile approach to addressing common problems associated with conventional non-visual notations like Braille music and vocally annotated scores.
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When confronted with an unfamiliar piece of printed music, a learner will sometimes opt to commit the entire score to memory. This is often the case for professional musicians; not needing to look at the sheet-music allows them to focus more on the aesthetics of the performance. Learning to play a piece of music this way is a demanding task, so demanding that many musicians prefer to have the music available to refer to during performance or, in some cases, to ‘sight-read’ directly from the score. To a blind learner, sight-reading is not an option; learning to play an entire piece from memory will always be a fundamental task. Traditionally, printed music has been transcribed into Braille music and more recently spoken descriptions such as Talking Scores [1] and Spoken Music [2] have become available. Of course, there are also those who prefer learning to play ‘by ear’ but that in itself is a daunting task, particularly if an accurate performance is to be achieved.
There are a number of problems with Braille music but possibly the most significant is the relatively small number of blind people who read Braille. The second most obvious problem is that Braille music is effectively a serial transcription of information that is normally perceived in parallel. Large amounts of information need to be transcribed even though the reader may not wish to read everything that is present in the score (this is often true). This same problem of ‘bulk’ is also present in vocally annotated music. With Braille music, a single item of common music notation (CMN) often leads to more than one symbol when transcribed such that the total number of symbols produced increases noticeably. This particular issue is not likely to disappear easily so the question that needs to be asked is whether there is a more effective way of organising the presentation of all the transcribed musical information? In essence, this was the aim of the Weasel project.
A prototype system for the non-visual delivery of music notation was developed in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York. The system, called Weasel [3], passed through two developmental stages although the basic approach adopted remained the same each time. Tactile overlays were used in conjunction with a resistive touchpad such that a user could interact with a high level tactile representation of a page of music. The tactile components represented structural elements such as a number of bars-to-a-line, lines-to-a-page, repeat marks, first and second time bars and dynamic markings but nothing else; no notes, accents, slurs or other CMN symbols. Using this approach, the tactile aspect was kept simple; exploring a tactile diagram is not as easy as it might seem, so it was important to keep any tactile graphics easy to explore and simple to understand.
The remaining information from the score was still available, to access it a user simply needed to press onto a bar on the overlay, the information associated with that bar would be displayed to the user. The level of information retrieved was controlled by the user as was the format in which it was presented. The display options in Weasel I and II were audio playback (music), speech (using a speech synthesiser) and audio and speech (speech in rhythm with music). Different parts of the score could be turned ‘on’ or ‘off’ within the presentation depending on the nature of the task the user was attempting. For example, a typical task is to learn the notes in correct playing order but with little concern for how long each note should be sounded - the rhythm can be added to the pitches at a later point. In Weasel, aspects such as duration, pitch, fingering and other performance descriptors could be added in or removed using a simple auditory-tactile menuing system. This was controlled using buttons for the index, middle and ring finger of each hand; these were arranged as two groups of three buttons at the bottom of the overlay.
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| Figure 1: Weasel I |
The overlays on Weasel I were designed to look similar to the structural components of printed music. During initial testing it became clear that this approach of a direct visual-to-tactile mapping is likely to produce problems [4]. Weasel II used overlays that were more efficient in terms of tactual exploration keeping the amount of unguided exploration required by the user to a minimum. Effectively, the user follows a raised horizontal strip, with all tactile components included somewhere along the strip.
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| Figure 2: Weasel II |
Testing of Weasel showed the system to be highly promising. There were a number of limitations but these were essentially due to the experimental nature of the prototypes. In particular, the overlays had been produced using vacuum-formed PVC and these were laborious to produce. PVC had been chosen in preference to swell paper as it can produce a higher resolution of diagram and offers different levels of height. However, the benefits offered were outweighed by the associated complexity and production time.
Weasel is now entering a third developmental stage. The aim is relatively simple – to turn Weasel into a fully working system that allows users to import music, produce tactile overlays and interact with them but with a minimum requirement of specialist equipment. It would be desirable for Weasel to work with hardware and software components that are typically available within a special needs educational environment or that can at least be considered as easily available. Time allowing, it would also be desirable to adapt Weasel so that it can be used to write as well as read music.
Weasel was originally designed to provide a non-traditional approach to music notation that would benefit blind people who prefer not to read Braille music. However, there are people, sighted and blind, who prefer not to ‘read’ music at all, they prefer to play ‘by ear’. Weasel provides a structured approach to music learning for these people also. With this in mind, it could be beneficial to think in terms of Weasel as being a non-traditional approach to reading music – one that just happens to suit blind people.
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Ben Challis
Senior Lecturer
School of Engineering
Leeds Metropolitan University
Leeds
LS1 3HE
United Kingdom
Email: b.challis@lmu.ac.uk
Phone: +44 113 2832600 ext. 5873
Ben Challis is a Senior Lecturer at the Leeds Metropolitan University teaching on music technology-related courses within the School of Engineering. His main research interest is in improving access to music for people with disabilities.
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For citation purposes:
Challis, B. "Weasel: Access to Music Notation for Blind People", Cultivate Interactive, issue
8, 15 November 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/weasel/>
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ISSN 1471-3225 |