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By Christine Michaut - February 2003
This column aims to provide news of the European Commission's initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content. Its objectives are to pinpoint the latest developments in programmes, projects and activities and to give a clear picture of progress in the area since the last issue. It certainly does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of what the EC is doing in the area but rather a short summary of some of the key items.
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Our unit here in Luxembourg would like to wish all Cultivate readers a Happy New Year. The new year has already brought some changes and will no doubt ring in many more: in the process of restructuring of our Directorate, our unit was given a new title: "Preservation and Enhancement of Cultural Heritage". On 17 December 2002 the first IST call under the sixth Framework Programme was published [1]. This will bring substantial changes, as the call stems from a new workprogramme (2003-2004 [2]) and the instruments [3] and procedures of the new Framework Programme are quite different from those operated during the last Framework Programme.
The last issue of our electronic newsletter eCulture [4] put together the most important information on the new Framework Programme.
In order to spread the news as widely as possible, we already organised one information day in November and have just run a second on 27 January [5]. The aim of these information days was to provide an opportunity for you to learn about the expectations the Commission has for this first call and also obtain first-hand information on the new procedures.
Another meeting entitled "Mapping the Future" brought together participants from projects receiving Commission funding under the previous Framework Programme. The meeting took place in the Luxembourg Commission Building "Jean Monnet" on the 28th January. Its objective was to refine further research roadmaps setting the perspective for the 1st call and to facilitate networking of researchers. The days included one-hour presentation sessions organised around five topics with speakers from different backgrounds - industry, SMEs, research, institutions, etc.
As you may know, the Danish Presidency came to an end this December. Greece has taken over the presidency [6] for the coming six months and research as well as the Information Society seem to be among the priorities. A site on "Research and Innovation Information Service" is already online [7] . We are looking forward to very fruitful work under this presidency.
Our unit is planning two big meetings in collaboration with our projects. The first meeting is organised by TRIS and is aimed at promoting and fostering the exploitation of the results of 25 Take-up Trials launched in 2000 under the Action Line "new access modes to cultural and scientific content". The conference will be the final event to conclude two years of TRIS work on co-ordination and support for the 25 trials seeking to increase their cultural, scientific and commercial impact and exploit their results effectively. TRIS, which will end in October 2003, has now entered the second phase of its project activity focusing on the exploitation of the trials, supporting them with the production of business plans and with the promotion of their results. Details on this event can be found on the TRIS homepage [8] as well as the official invitation issued by TRIS [9].
The second event is EVA 2003 which will take place in Florence [10]. EVA stands for "Electronic imaging and the Visual Arts". This year's first conference will be dedicated to "Il Nuovo Rinascimento" ("The New Renaissance") and will take place from 24-28 March. The key aim of this event is to provide a forum for the user, supplier and scientific research communities to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans. Participants receive up-to-date news on new EC and international arts computing and telecomms initiatives as well as on projects in the visual arts field, archaeology and history. Working groups and new projects are promoted.
The third event is MILIA Cannes (26-28 March) where our unit will be represented with its own information stand.
The European Commission has published this guide to the Sixth Framework Programme which is intended as a source of information and assistance to people and organisations wishing to find out more about the programmes and activities included under FP6.
It gives an overview of the fundamental aspects of the objectives and mechanisms of FP6, and is intended as a reference manual rather than an exhaustive guide. This guide is available electronically [11].
This is Digicult's "Thematic Issue 2", issued in December 2002. It highlights the fact that a cultural heritage organisation's ability to harvest, re-use and realise the value of its assets will only ever be as good as the mechanisms that it can put into place for the storage and retrieval of assets from the media vault. It concentrates on the question of how cultural and scientific heritage organisations could enhance their mission-related activities by using a new breed of technologies called Digital Asset Management System (DAMS).
The study is available online in low or high resolution or in paper version (please contact John Pereira [12] ).
Also issued by our DigiCULT Project: DigiCULT.Info - the 2nd issue of their newsletter [13]
(Key Action Line III of the IST programme in the European Union's 5th RTD Framework Programme)
Factsheets from all the projects run under the 5th Framework Programme have been published online and will also be available as an interactive CD-ROM, which will include video showcases from ten projects [14].
Our "Diffuse" Project (Dissemination of InFormal and Formal Useful Specifications and Experiences) [15] held its Final Conference on Brussels on 12th December 2002. The objective of the Diffuse Project was to provide a single, value-added, entry point to up-to-date reference and guidance information on available and emerging standards and specifications that facilitate the electronic exchange of information. European Commissioner Liikanen, responsible for Enterprise and the Information Society gave a speech entitled "Convergence of Web Services". Our next issue will give you a detailed report on this Final Conference.
The latest business guide published by "Diffuse" for the Dissemination of Informal and formal Useful Specifications and Experiences to Research and Technology Development Communities is the Diffuse Guide to Virtual Reality. After a brief history of the development of virtual reality systems, the guide explains the role of the three standards used to integrate this industry, the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), VRML 97 and the recently proposed Extensible 3D (X3D) language, which includes an XML representation for virtual reality systems.
For five days in April 2003 the Pulman-XT Project [16] will hold three training workshops for Public Library Managers and Senior Librarians from Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, F.Y.R.O.M. (former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), Moldova, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). This will be hosted in three centres of excellence: Helsinki (Finland), Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Veria (Greece).
The purpose of the three workshops is to provide training and first-hand experience of new developments for public library managers in countries or areas where policies and implementation are less advanced. They also aim to encourage the cascading of workshop findings by the participants. The workshops will focus on management, project management, ICT, communication, international co-operation and new skills in librarianship but will also touch upon topics such as public service, special user groups and library buildings too.
Another highlight of the PULMAN XT Project will be the policy conference in Oeiras in Portugal on 13 and 14 March 2003. The policy conference will be a platform for high level policy makers and decision makers from 36 countries across Europe to share experiences about delivering services locally in the information age. Regular information on the programme will be available on the Pulman site [17], for example, invitees, speakers and so forth. So watch this space!
Successful completion of the European Treasury Browser Project paves the way for the new European Learning Resources (ELR) service starting 2003 [18]. The European Treasury Browser Project, completed in October 2002, was instrumental in consolidating an operational infrastructure for centralised access to educational resources submitted by repositories across Europe. This has enabled the European Schoolnet to open up a new European Learning Resources (ELR) service based on the key achievements of the ETB project. This project was funded by our Unit in the IST programme.
To address issues of interoperability between digital image collections and other important resources of digital cultural information such as digital library collections and the emerging semantic web, ARTISTE supports amongst other topics open standards for information retrieval. There are therefore two new interfaces to the public system, the first using the Open Archives Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol, and the second using the Z39.50 Search and Retrieve Web Service.
The project has now issued an open invitation to use these points of access to ARTISTE. The project particularly welcomes your feedback on accessing the ARTISTE system through these new interfaces [19].
Born of exemplary co-operation between the Council of Europe and the European Union through the "HEREIN" Project, the European Heritage Network [20] is intended to bring together those European authorities which work in the cultural heritage sector. Accessible via Internet, the network is the only heritage information system of its kind. If offers:
Last but not least I would like to mention the move of our colleague Patricia Manson to the post of Deputy Head of Unit for Technology-Enhanced Learning. We shall all miss her here but would sincerely like to offer our: Félicitations!
Good luck to everyone in 2003
Christine Michaut
Information & Communication Officer
Preservation and Enhancement of Cultural Heritage Unit
Email: christine.michaut@cec.eu.int
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For citation purposes:
Michaut, C. "DIGICULT Column", Cultivate Interactive, issue
9, 7 February 2003
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue9/digicult/>
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