European Cultural Heritage Online - ECHO

and kindly offered Lund University as a testbed. As an effect, ECHO was described in localpress and a briefing was given to the Board of deans (Humanities, Social Sciences, Medicine,Natural Sciences, Technical Sciences, Law, and Economy). Also, the faculty of theHumanities has decided to announce a doctoral position dedicated to ECHO. Lund Universityis an organisation which can profit from ECHO on all levels (research, education,construction of IT-based courses etc), and where we would stand a chance of evaluating theeffects and effective usage of ECHO resources, not the least since LU has internal proceduresfor evaluation.At a local ECHO workshop for Lund university, April 7-8, the ECHO concept was furtherelaborated to groups of postgraduate students, senior researchers and heads of department.The idea of profiting from ECHO as a framework for systematizing and sharing own researchdata was widely cherished. Many participants decided to make reference to ECHO in theirfuture research applications, and to introduce graduate students to IMDI as a method forsystematizing own research data. Representatives of IT-based education and distanceeducation saw new opportunities from using ECHO resources.The focus of the Lund workshop was on language data, but one professor of film science gotinterested in using the ECHO framework for film data, and one professor of musicology for alarge project concerning the history of music in the Baltic countries (song texts, examples ofsinging performance, biographical notes of musicians, etc). Although the history of musiccannot be a priority within the ECHO pilot, the example testifies to the need for precisely theinfrastructural support offered by ECHO and the AGORA not only for the four targeteddomains of the pilot phase of ECHO but also for other scientific and cultural domains.Further, a new research library is presently being built at the Centre for languages andliterature at Lund University. This library will serve as a privileged testbed for the integrationof library resources and ECHO resources to create a powerful information accessingenvironment for students and researchers. At the department of Library and InformationScience at Lund University, the work with integrating ECHO with the new library has alreadygenerated three MA theses. Indeed, if this work proves successful, ECHO could work outcriteria for ”ECHO certified research libraries”.SchoolsIn the same vein, the educational authority of public schools in the Lund region has signalledan interest in ECHO, and a contact seminar between the schools and Lund University hasbeen initiated. Among other things, five schools now participate in a project using andcontributing to ECHO pilot material on writing traditions and writing development in schoolchildren in different European countries.In the domain of natural science, the JASON project is a successful attempt to build apedagogical interface on the Internet between university research labs and activities underschool curricula.We believe that interfaces between ECHO and school activities can helpextend ECHO to serve a similar role in the humanities as that of JASON in the naturalsciences.Museum visitorsTwo more potential user groups are worth mentioning in this context. The first is Skånes19