Which EU projects are aiming to increase on-line accessibility of diverse content?
The next challenge to overcome, outlined in the i2010 Communication, is online accessibility of digitized content. Digitizing content itself is no use if no one or a very narrow group of people is going to use it. Moreover, there are many benefits for Europeans if such content is available on the Internet - they can use it for learning, leisure or building new services based on it. The following paragraphs contain a short description of projects aiming at making more content accessible for the general public.
Organisational challenges
ISAAC - Integrated e-Services for Advanced Access to Heritage in Cultural Tourist Destinations (2006-2009) – There is a huge potential for the use of cultural content in the tourist sector, especially by using new innovative technologies. The ISAAC project aimed at researching this possible potential by preparing expert opinions on the topic. It created a platform which enables tourists to check the local history and plan what places they are going to visit. There are three prototypes now: for Amsterdam, Genoa and Leipzig.
Financial challenges
Europeana 1914-1918 - is based on an initiative at the University of Oxford where people across Britain were asked to bring family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. The success of the idea – which became the Great War Archive – has encouraged Europeana, Europe's digital archive, library and museum, to bring other national institutions across Europe into an alliance with Oxford University. The collaboration brings European stories online alongside their British, German, Slovenian, Luxembourgian, Irish, etc. counterparts in a World War One stories collection.
EASAIER - Enabling Access to Sound Archives through Integration, Enrichment and Retrieval (2006-2008) – It was set up to enhance the quality and improve interoperability of digital objects kept in sound archives. Some of its research areas were methods of describing sound objects (its metadata), sound processing methods (e.g. identifying emotion), retrieving different types of media, tools facilitating creating digital sound archives (e.g.: for creating music score notation for diverse instruments). The results of the project were prototypes.
DISMARC - Discovering Music Archives (2006-2008) – It was funded for opening music recordings collections from different institutions (e.g.: archives, broadcasters, museums, etc.) in Europe for the broader audience. It created one common catalogue of music searchable by everyone. It keeps metadata about music recordings and enables users to listen to them or to contact the content provider to get the audio source.
iTACITUS - Intelligent Tourism and Cultural Information through Ubiquitous Services (2006-2009) – One of the reasons of the i2010 initiative is making Europeans more aware of our culture and cultural heritage. One of the ways to gain this aim is cultural tourism. The iTACITUS project researches the ways the cultural tourism can be encouraged by means of digitized cultural heritage and its presence in the global network. In addition, it created a tool for facilitating itinerary creation. Some of the results can be seen in the film below (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Some of the results of iTACITUS.
GAMA - Gateway to Archives of Media Art (2007-2009) – It was set up to gather European digital media art in one place and open it to the public. It was achieved by their service with the multilingual and user-oriented interface which you can check here. Furthermore, some guided tours were prepared basing on these materials, for example "Dancing on Thin Ice".
Technical challenges
CALIMERA - Cultural Applications: Local Institutions Mediating Electronic Resource Access (2003-2005) – It was funded to create and promote best practices in European cultural heritage institutions for each country involved in the CALIMERA network. One of its main objectives was the promotion of the Information Society Agenda among those institutions. It published a vast number of resources that are handy for every digital repository creator (you can find them on the project site).MOSAICA - Semantically Enhanced, Multifaceted, Collaborative Access to Cultural Heritage (2006-2008) – It was set up to create innovative technology to create an advanced web portal (e.g.: semantic search, results on the map) which facilities knowledge discovery. It worked on the Jewish Diaspora materials which goes back 2000 years. Its richness was anticipated as a good base for presenting the potential of such a new innovative service. You can see the demonstration portal here.
CACAO - Cross-language Access to Catalogues And On-line libraries (2007-2009) – It was set up to research multilingual text retrieval. It aimed at enabling the creation of query in one language and then retrieving results with descriptions in other languages. It is called cross-language retrieval. As a base for testing, it uses textual content from digital libraries and catalogue systems from Europe. You can check the prototype service here.
Legal challenges
P2P-FUSION - Peer to Peer Fusion (2006-2009) – "For legal creative reuse" [source] It was set up to encourage audiovisual creative activity by preparing an easy-to-use solution for general public. One of the main stands was the creation of a clear licensing framework for such works, thus enabling legal creative reuse. Its main outcome is the Fusion software available for download here.