European Cultural Heritage Online - ECHO

last paragraph, to be very promising. Instead the following list of problems from which allresources for the history of science suffer to a greater or lesser extent is provided.• The Volume Problem: Only a tiny fraction of the material relevant to the history ofscience is presented on the Web• The Presentation Problem: Most of the available sources are not appropriatelypresented• The Connectivity Problem: The hypertext capability of the medium is not sufficientlyexploited for connecting the available pieces across sources, collections, countries anddisciplines• The Accessability Problem: the few digitized collections such as libraries and archivesof documents are often not accessible to research or to the public• The Search Problem: A content-based index structure for effective search is notavailable• The Exploitation Problem: The scientific and educational exploitation of digitallyavailable resources is severely hampered by the lack of appropriate method and tools• The Suitability Problem: current web technology does not yet meet the requirementsposed by the complexity and heterogeneity of cultural, historic and scientific content• The Distribution Problem: Composition of sites from distributed resources andinteroperability of different data structure and software systems is difficult andsometimes impossible• The interactivity Problem: It is hardly ever possible to comment and never possible toaggregate new contents from old.The last problem of interactivity will be discussed further in the next section.Annotation and collaboration through the WebEven the best websites available are still far from realizing the original vision of the Internetto be an interactive read-write medium and do not offer platforms for scholarly cooperationon historical sources. Two exceptional examples are the “History of Recent Science andTechnology” project (http://hrst.mit.edu/) or the Archimedes Project(http://archimedes.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de and http://archimedes.fas.harvard.edu), which isbuilding up a digital research library offering at the same time tools for the comprehension ofsources in the history of mechanics. These tools cover not only contemporary dictionaries andencyclopedias that are linked to the sources but as well software tools for the annotation ofthese texts (Arboreal). Furthermore, the project allows locally distributed editorial work onthe sources, combining visual representation with textual analysis.The role of the history of science case study on the WebThe role of the history of science case study is to provide seed collections combining some ofthe technical solutions developed by the advanced projects such as the Archimedes project inorder to apply them to a wider range of sources and to offer an infrastructure helping the“dynamic accumulation” of further sources by lowering the technical and competencethreshold for putting them on-line. Furthermore, a dynamic clearing house model has beendeveloped to test its feasibility.3.4 History of art (Kieven)Until now, Art History is almost only present on the Internet in the form of digitized museumcollections that can be accessed through the web: If they can be used for free, they allow usersto see images of the objects in a quality sufficient for representation in a web-browser but notfor scholarly work. A search function is provided, but in many cases limited to a simple full13