European Cultural Heritage Online - ECHO

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2. Technology in the cultural heritage sector (Wittenburg)Various discussions at recent meetings with leading cultural heritage (CH) institutions inEurope and with partners in ECHO confirmed the impressions about the state of technology inthe CH domain that were made in the ECHO documents. In detail we can say the following:• Some institutions created their own database solution that serves exactly the needs ofthe particular institutes. Others are at the very beginning in setting up such databases.• It will become non-trivial to combine the different database solutions already at thestructural and repository level, since only few institutions formulated openaccessibility as a goal. In the institutions often there is no knowledge how to accessthe databases for example to harvest certain descriptions.• The most urgent needs are directed towards establishing a descriptive metadatadomain to allow easy resource management and discovery on the institute’s holdings.CH institutes are faced with gigantic problems here, since they often have to createhundreds of thousands of such descriptions.• Even the concept of descriptive metadata is not at all clear to all institutions and othershave not yet decided about the set to be used (even typical libraries such as the DutchNational Library came to the conclusion that Dublin Core will not be sufficient fortheir purposes). Only few are at an advanced state insofar that they have decided abouta set, have clear and open concept definitions and can offer the descriptions forharvesting.• CH institutions are very much interested in tools that allow them to create andmaintain metadata descriptions (semi) automatically, since otherwise they will only beable to partly describe their holding.• More advanced notions as being discussed in ECHO such as rich and collaborativeannotations are seen as future visions far away from concrete reality. There are notools yet that support this kind of work that are known to them and acceptable.• In general these CH institutions see the potential of offering their holding on the netand even allow other people to add comments, photos etc. They know that there aremany groups of experts that know much more details about part of their holding thanthe archivists themselves and they would, of course, like to include this expertknowledge. But yet they have not had time to think about solutions.• Interoperability issues are just started to be discussed by the more advancedinstitutions, but there are yet no attempts to achieve interoperability at the semanticlevel. Creating the necessary ontological categories for the individual disciplines and,even more demanding, interrelating them, is a very difficult endeavor and yet it cannot be seen when and how this can be tackled.• Almost all institutions see big problems with respect to IPR aspects 1 , therefore theyare still hesitant about how to present their holding in the Internet. This problem issolved partly by having ready-made web-sites as “guided tours” such that theinstitutions can put their “brand name” everywhere and can use low-resolution imagesetc. They see the great potential of offering their holding such that external people candefine their own view on collections from different museums, i.e. combining theholdings to get new insights. However, this would mean that they completely loose1 In this note just one aspect related to IPR is discussed, but there are in fact several. It is strongly recommendedto organize a big workshop about IPR questions under the ECHO umbrella. First discussions have taken place inthis respect and we expect to organize such an ECHO workshop in January.4
control of the usage of their holding which could mean that the brand name of theinstitute (the anchor for them to earn money which they have to survive) coulddisappear from the newly created web-offering. Therefore, we need a new ethicalfoundation and a clarification of the legal situation on a world-wide scale, since webofferingsare available world-wide, in order to ensure that the principles mentioned inthe ECHO charter can be followed.In conclusion, we are, as yet, far away from what is referred to in the ECHO proposal as acommon technological framework. In most cases, we lack the simplest levels that would makepossible a combination of collections. Moreover, different methods have been established inthe diferent disciplines and these are partly linked to commercial considerations. These couldform additional obstacles on the way to such a framework. It is obvious that for the currentECHO project only small steps can be achieved. It will require great collaborative effortsfrom technologists and experts from CH institutions to overcome the current limitations and itwill require new ethical and legal principles to convince the great institutions to contribute inthe way the ECHO charter describes it.3. The contentIncreasing quantitiesOne way of approximating the amount of that information relevant to the European culturalheritage which is currently available on the web is to consult available statistics. On a nationallevel, this kind of statistics is sometimes available from the library world. Thus, since 1997,The Royal Library of Sweden Stockholm, sweeps the web for Swedish cultural resources onan annual basis. The results are made public in the form of descriptive statistics distributed onfour tables: Bytes, Web sites, Number of files, and The most frequent file types (text/html,gif, jpeg, text/plain, and appl/pdf). These four tables – as updated by 2003 - are rendered inAppendix 3.0 together with short descriptive conmments in English. Although the statistics islimited to information judged relevant to Sweden’s cultural heritage only, the numbers maygive a hint as to the rapidly increasing quantities of information. Among other things, it isobserved that there is a steep increase in number of files during the past six-year-period: fromaround 7 million to 40 million files. Calculated in bytes, the increase goes from around 160Gbytes to 1800 Gbytes, with the greatest proportional increase from 1999.The four cultural domainsWith respect to the cultural domain of languages, the situation is extremely varying.Languages appear in written, spoken and signed (sign languages) forms. Because ofrestrictions of the storage medium, exemplars or samples of language usage before the late19th century only exist in written forms. Later samples include spoken language (audio) andsigned language (film, video). Also, computer technology has led to a growing amount ofrecordings of on-line writing (as distinct from the old text samples of off-line writing).Further, the combination of sound, (moving) picture and text – recently in the form ofcomputerized multimedia representations – allow for detailed documentation of linguisticcommunication online in its particular setting (physical and social circumstances). The newtechnologies are used to an increasing degree for creating computerized samples of language5
Page 1 and 2: European Cultural Heritage OnlineEC
Page 3: 1. Introduction (Renn & Strömqvist
Page 7 and 8: The three search words yielded more
Page 9 and 10: endangered languages in Siberia; Fr
Page 11 and 12: Conclusions and directions for the
Page 13 and 14: last paragraph, to be very promisin
Page 15 and 16: Collections and web portals of digi
Page 17 and 18: This framework, called ZUCCARO (Zop
Page 19 and 20: and kindly offered Lund University

European Cultural Heritage Online - ECHO

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