GISELA & CHAIN Workshop Digital Cultural Heritage Network EGI User Forum Antonella FRESA DC-NET Technical Coordinator GISELA & CHAIN Workshop Digital Cultural Heritage Network 1

Table of content The Digital Cultural Heritage community: who, where, what The needs The vision Priorities Services for content providers Services for managing and adding value to the content Services for the virtual research communities

Digital Cultural Heritage community: who Composed by the cultural institutions: Museums Libraries Archives Audiovisual repositories Archaeological sites Central institutes of the Ministries (catalogues and research) In general : very limited experience in the ICT limited knowledge of what e-Infrastructures are

Digital Cultural Heritage community: where Dispersed along the whole countries With different access to connectivity and computing resources Generally using in-house data centres

Digital Cultural Heritage community: what As content providers: Digitisation and cataloguing Aggregation of content from different repositories Hosting digital content repositories Protect IRP of digital content Provide access to other communities (e.g. education) As content consumers: Search on federated repositories Processing of data (e.g. statistical analysis) Integrate with data from other sciences

What the digital cultural data need high quality information technology management (to ensure trust, availability, reliability, long term safety of content, security, preservation and sustainability); access facilities offered to the final users who will search into the DCH e-Infrastructure for their research and to the cultural institutions that will deliver their data to the DCH e-Infrastructure; interoperation of cultural heritage data with non-cultural heritage data and other research data.

The vision: toward a Digital Cultural Heritage e-Infrastructure To implement a seamless data and services infrastructure for the research of the cultural heritage virtual community, which provides key services such as: preservation and backup, authentication and data integrity, collaborative research environments, advanced (cross-collection, multilingual and semantic) search and retrieval intellectual property management and authorised use of DCH content.

Priorities from Digital Cultural Heritage Networking and Training ICT Research and Validation Pilots Best Practice Network of excellence, competence centres, labs and innovation areas

Key networking requirements Knowledge of user needs Who is who Programmes and policies profiling Best practice Handbooks and Technical References Consensus building Seminars, workshops and dissemination activities How the e-infrastructures can help: videoconferencing services, cooperation in awareness and information activities addressing jointly the political stakeholders 9

Training: a multi-disciplinary syllabus Digital cultural heritage experts are required also to be knowledgeable about ICT and e-Infrastructures A new generation of professionals will need training in a truly multi-disciplinary syllabus which includes: Digitisation and creation of digital resources Collection and digital repository management Management and curation of digital objects Long term preservation Multilingual information access IPR Usability End user interaction and target analysis 10

Research and Validation pilots ICT Research: Data curation, quality and preservation Indexing searching and navigation Interoperability, distribution and access DCH ecosystems Validation Pilots to validate technologies integrated into new services, validation within real-world conditions: Whether the new services actually meet the needs of the DCH community (both content providers and content consumers) Where the new services are sustainable over time 11

Best practice Sharing of information across DCH initiatives, Building consensus Gathering and disseminating examples of best practice This will support content providers: to learn from one another to develop of skills within the DCH community to enable new research to be carried out 12

Networks of excellence & innovation areas Services and facilities which can support the DCH community in its interaction with e-Infrastructures the digital cultural heritage community requires experts and knowledge transfer which combine traditional cultural heritage skills with ICT expertise and awareness of repurposing opportunities such as eLearning Cost reduction in digitisation Application of standards 13

Typical DCH research workflow Find: accessing information Process: tools for manipulating information Publish: make the results visible online Conference: discuss and annotate published information Preserve: maintaining access to content over the longer term Security Plus lower-level “basic digital services” such as email, data storage, web hosting, etc. 14

Services priorities Priorities for the Digital Cultural Heritage sector has been put together with the typical workflow of the DCH research, in order to idetify the DC-NET services priorities For this scope, services are divided into 3 categories: Services for content providers, which are related to the creation of online data resources for DCH Services for managing and adding value to the content itself Services which enable, support and enhance virtual research communities and the activities of content consumers 15

Services for content provides and data resource creation From common issues: Interoperability of online resources Insularity in terms of searching Changes in location High cost of establishment Vulnerability to technical problems Limitation on servers capacity and processing 16

Services for content provides and data resource creation To common priorities: Interoperation Aggregation Cross-search Semantic search Persistent identification Set-up services Stable platform Scalability 17

Services for managing and adding value to content Geo-referencing 3D representation Virtual reality and immersive interfaces Annotation Linked data generation 18

Services for content consumers The “cafeterial model”: a broad range of services to be made available, without the need to actually deliver them for all members of the community. User authentication and access control Collaborative environments Advanced search Visualisation 19

Authentication & Security How each service priority is addressed by the e-infrastructures facilities Priority Fast networks Processor Power Data Storage Authentication & Security Interoperability x X Aggregation Storage & Preservation Advanced Search supports Persistent identifiers Data resource setup services Stable platforms Scalability Geo-referencing 3D visualisation & manipulation User Authentication & Access Control Cooperative Environments Conferencing Annotation & Discussion IPR & Digital Rights Management 20

The Digital Cultural Heritage is a growing Community committed toward the implementation of a stable infrastructure DC-NET – Information seminars and a Joint Activities Plan towards the implementation of DCH e-Infrastructure: www.dc-net.org INDICATE - Piloting and Use cases on international dimension: www.indicate-project.eu) 21

See you in Budapest on 23-24 June 2011 for the second DC-NET Conference on e-Infrastructures for Digital Cultural Heritage 22

Thank you Antonella FRESA DC-NET Technical Coordinator Antonella.fresa@beniculturali.it