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Cultivate Interactive Issue 9: Editorial

Welcome to the ninth issue of Cultivate Interactive.

It is quite a task writing the final editorial for the last issue in the current run of a magazine. You need to face in all three directions, past, present and future. To a large extent I have solved the the first of these three demands in offering you another article, Cultivating Understanding: The story of Cultivate Interactive, which will give you a view of a webzine which has now produced some 113 feature articles and a host of other articles. So for the moment I will move on to the future.

As far as the Magazine itself and its future is concerned, I need do no more than quote one of our evaluators: "..Clearly the main deliverables of this project will require to be maintained if they are to be of continuing use, namely the WWW site, the e-zine, the discussion list and the ALM contact list, etc. ....", and indeed this e-zine will be maintained for at least three years, whatever its long-term future. It has been particularly pleasing to see the achievements made by both -EU and-CEE Projects in respect of dissemination activities, and of course Cultivate Interactive has been pleased to play its part.

But for an expert view over the past and towards the future, I thought it would be interesting to hear the views of the Project Managers if I could get hold of them, and was fortunate enough to be able to prevail at short notice upon David Fuegi, Project Manager CULTIVATE-CEE, for his thoughts on how the project has performed and what the future might hold:

Cultivate Interactive: Are you pleased with how CULTIVATE-CEE has performed as a project over its lifetime?

DF: Very pleased. The project endured many tribulations in coming to contract but the partners were still there and still keen when we got going. The British Council and Concha Fernández de la Puente deserve credit for overcoming the initial obstacles.

Cultivate Interactive: What do you regard as the best moments in your time as Project Manager for CULTIVATE-CEE?

DF: My best moments have been attending the big consortium meetings, looking round the table and seeing that all the partners have turned up without me having needed to twist their arms. I have always had excellent support from the partners.

Cultivate Interactive: What do you consider the greatest achievements of the Project?

DF: To help create a team of informed supporters of the objectives of EU programmes in our sectors in the NAS (New Associated States). Cultivate Interactive, the Cultivate E-list and the linked Web sites would all need to be reinvented if they lapsed.

Cultivate Interactive: Equally, what would you consider the biggest challenges or difficulties for the Project?

DF: At overall project level I think the coordinator [the British Council in Poland] has had the hardest time of it because some of our partners have suffered from a serious phobia against filling in forms. In some cases this condition seems incurable. We needed to achieve an intimate working relationship with Cultivate EU and succeeded. At country level, many of the partners have cheerfully overcome serious resource issues and achieved a high profile in difficult circumstances.

Cultivate Interactive: What do you see in the future for the sort of work begun in CULTIVATE?

DF: The reviewers gave all the Cultivate projects a good review and encouraged us to think about sustainability. We are hoping to carry forward the best features and products of the projects into the 6th Framework as part of a bigger grouping. Some countries are willing to make a financial contribution to future work but they will need a recognisable international network of support. It is not easy, but we are working towards putting something into the first call.

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However, for the present, we have another issue for you, (and my thanks to Shirley Keane for her support in its production), with a range of articles both from the DIGICULT programme and elsewhere, starting of course with Christine Michaut's Digicult Column for the latest news from her unit. I have also detected something of an archeological flavour in this issue with two articles describing systems to guide visitors around archeological sites, one by Emily Whetter who reports on the PAST Project and the other by Vassilios Vlahakis, John Karigiannis and Nikolaos Ioannidis describing their work on ARCHEOGUIDE.

In his article on OpenHeritage, Salvatore Lusso takes us through an approach to combining the benefits of technology and more evolved business models in order to promote cultural tourism in the less well known regions of Europe. Marco Meli's article on the MESMUSES Project tells of an initiative to develop the most valuable scientific and technical heritage in science museums into an active memory in other domains.

David Fuegi gives us a picture of the provision and use of library statistics and how the work of the LIBECON Project can help shape policy as provide you with data yourselves. Cary Karp brings us up to speed on the latest Adventures of the .museum domain whilst Marcel van Dijk relates the interesting but bumpy ride taken by the Amsterdam Municipal Public Record Office in its first ever project to digitise government records, entitled It Always Hurts the First Time!

Paul Schreilechner gives us an article on the TREBIS Project, a biodiversity information system which is working on new ways of presenting ecological insights by combining multimedia technologies with geographic information and database systems. Nick Crofts, Martin Doerr and Tony Gill report on the CIDOC (Comité International pour la Documentation) and its work on the Conceptual Reference Model, an aid to comprehension and dialogue that can help to establish the conceptual "common ground" between different disciplines and domains.

In addition to news and events there are two reports on CULTIVATE meetings in Vienna last autumn where participants convened for a combined project meeting and then the Annual Review. As you will see from the latter, a great number of solid achievements were recognised there. One which gained special mention by the evaluators was the Web magazine Cultivate Interactive, something which, naturally, pleased both my colleagues and me.

However we all also agreed that the bedrock of that success lay in the enthusiasm and commitment of the Cultivate Interactive authors as well as the professionalism of those CULTIVATE colleagues with whom we have worked. So as the Magazine goes temporarily, we hope, into hibernation, (still available at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ for at least three years), I would like to thank readers, authors and colleagues alike for their support and interest in our work.

Richard Waller (Editor)

Date of Page: 7 February 2003