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| Issue 9 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
Richard Waller, editor of this webzine, gives a brief history of its beginnings and its role in the dissemination of the CULTIVATE programme. A few images on the way through the article illustrate the path it has taken in its work.
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Cultivate Interactive was set up as part of the CULTIVATE-EU Project which began in February 2000. It formed Workpackage 3 of the proposal. The aim of this workpackage was to provide an electronic magazine which would offer a forum for dissemination and discussions within the area of cultural heritage. Projects funded in the cultural heritage area would make use of the electronic journal to inform the community of their work. The electronic journal would also provide a more general forum for others working in this area.
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| Augmented reality from Issue 1 |
Along with other components, such as the mailing list, the Web magazine was intended, as the proposal put it, to "fill a gap existing today, which is precisely the lack of information on project results related to archives, museums and libraries, and its connection with the entrepreneurial side." Given the slightly unwieldy working title, European Archives, Libraries and Museums Matters, the first issue of the Magazine appeared in July 2000 under the editorial leadership of Marieke Napier, UKOLN Information Officer, and under the snappier title of Cultivate Interactive. Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus at UKOLN, was project manager.
With regard to the webzine's design, it aimed to conform to WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) accessibility guidelines, for example by ensuring that images should have a meaningful ALT attribute, that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used for defining layout wherever possible and that frames should be avoided wherever possible. Features included a search engine for the both and simple and advanced searching of the magazine, links to the Project Web site, help pages, navigation bar to other areas of the issue or other issues and a site map. At the article level additionally all pages provided anchors to the authors' details and in ssi (server side includes) footers there were also details for article citation purposes, links to a translation service and ultimately an annotation service; the latter a recent addition as a means of providing greater interactivity for readers and authors.
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| Extract from an archive-quality image from Issue 1 |
As far as the structure of the content was concerned, each issue divided into the following areas to which access was granted by the navigation bar as well as hypertext links from contents pages: Feature Articles: articles about DIGICULT projects and related work; Regular Articles: regular articles (e.g. technology watch, behind the Web site, etc., practical implementations, reports on events and conferences; News and Events: recent news of general interest to the Cultivate Interactive readership and forthcoming conferences, workshops, etc.; and Miscellaneous Articles, for example a competition.
At the centre of the regular articles section the Digicult column has been an anchor for the Magazine and a sound and ready source of up-to-date information for its readership; I take this opportunity to thank Concha Fernández de la Puente, Christine Michaut and Ian Pigott for their telling contributions to this section of Cultivate Interactive. There can be little doubt of course that the feature articles have been at the heart of the Magazine, whilst those emanating from the DIGICULT projects can be regarded as being of primary importance. Combined with those from other areas of work, the range has been considerable. It is difficult to know which to mention as examples other than to mention some which have over time achieved a degree of greater popularity as indicated by the Magazine's statistics package.
Two articles, An Introduction to Streaming Video and Streaming Video: A Look Behind the Scenes clearly attracted interest in their subject as did a follow-up article in that area entitled An Introductory Guide to Audio and Video Encoding. Considerable interest was raised by an article providing a detailed list of the different Content Management Systems currently available, entitled A Content Management and Web Publishing Systems Gazetteer. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants reported on a meeting at which representatives of national and international cultural content creation programmes considered scope for greater collaboration. A second article on the ARTISTE Project reviewed its achievements in developing an image retrieval system based on metadata and content that explores and analyses thousands of images from major art galleries across Europe; this article provided many illustrative examples of the sampling process. An article entitled The Historical Data Warehouse reported on adapting concepts from Information and Knowledge Management and Information and Communication Technology into the field of organising and giving access to metadata about historical archives and collections. This article appeared in English and Dutch. A number of articles on metadata appeared including Content-Based Multimedia Information Handling: Should we Stick to Metadata? in which the authors discuss retrieval and navigation as ways of accessing multimedia information and the use of content as an aid to these activities. An article on Virtual Reference also attracted considerable interest. Naturally one can mention many more, including The Search for the Most Fascinating Library Buildings in the World, but the list has to stop somewhere.
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| The Palazzo Ducale of Urbino from Issue 3 |
However it would be unwise to underestimate the value of feature articles that have appeared in considerable numbers over the life of the Magazine, the articles residing under the banner "Other Areas". They certainly could not be faulted for their diversity of subject. Topics ranged right across the board from intellectual property rights, the rationale for e-texts, machine translation, the future of Virtual Reality, techniques of conference presentations including accessibility issues, the failings of 'Eurospeak' and developments in Web technologies. Despite this selective list, these articles on issues have been outnumbered by those reporting on projects operating outside the Digicult umbrella.
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| The Upper Side of the Sky from Issue 5 |
Marieke Napier published issue 6 of the Magazine before moving to take up other work within UKOLN. The legacy of her work was indeed clear, not least in the content included in that issue that promoted the new activity starting under the banner of Cultivate Russia. As her successor I was also keen to ensure that readers were aware of developments in that area. Accordingly issue 8 sought to give space and attention to the work of Russian Federation colleagues, including the appearance of issue 1 of Cultivate Russia Web-Magazine.
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| The Château de Villandry from Issue 7 |
In October 2002 I attended the annual review of the EU and CEE projects. The outcomes of that review are recorded in greater detail elsewhere, but from the standpoint of Cultivate Interactive, we were naturally pleased at the announcement by the evaluators of one of the two special mentions in respect of the contribution that Cultivate Interactive had made to the Cultivate Project.
However, as I observed to the participants at the review, some of whom themselves had written for Cultivate Interactive, the largest credit in my opinion had to go to all those busy colleagues who, because of their enthusiasm and dedication to their project, had found time to contribute articles to the Magazine.
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URL: <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk>
Email: cultivate-editor@ukoln.ac.uk
Richard has provided a valuable summary of Cultivate Interactive. As the project manager for most of the life of Cultivate Interactive, I would like to thank Richard for his work, and also that of Marieke Guy (née Napier) Richard's predecessor as editor. Thanks should also be given to Philip Hunter, Shirley Keane and Eddie Young, who provided additional support for Cultivate Interactive.
Although this is the final issue to be published under the EU's FP5
DIGICULT programme we are currently seeking funding to continue
publication. We hope to return sometime in the near future. In the
meantime the Cultivate Interactive Web site will continue to function
for a period of at least three years from the end of its funding.
Brian Kelly
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For citation purposes:
Waller, R. "Cultivating Understanding:A History of Cultivate Interactive", Cultivate Interactive, issue
9, 7 February 2003
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue9/cihistory/>
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