COINE Cultural Objects in Networked Environments

Introduction Throughout Europe there are many cultures that are locally defined within communities These cultures are often expressed through formal bodies: – Libraries – Museums – Other cultural institutions (e.g. artistic groups, etc)

Introduction – The Past Before the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies: –The collections were exposed locally Remained unknown to the world outside the community –They were exposed on a ‘visit-only’ basis One had to be present in the area to see the collection –Many personal collections (e.g. personal archives, etc) remained unknown No effective way to promote private collections

Introduction – The Present With the advent of ICTs, the local communities were offered the abilities: –To capture and present their cultural heritage more efficiently –To share their heritage with other communities, locally, nationally and internationally and –To strengthen their relationship with the public More collaborative More Interactive

Introduction –The Present (…continued) Many current implementations of Information Systems: –Exploit the capabilities of the WWW to expose and share their collections, often present limitations in Structure Consistency Interoperability

Introduction –The Present (…continued) These implementations are often simple web sites offering a limited set of services: – Simple lists of links to external resources – Search – and – retrieve functionality from a simple relational database

COINE - Aim The Development of an efficient networked environment that will enable individuals and small communities to take full advantage of most, or all, of the capabilities that are offered by the current Information and Communication Technologies

COINE – Core Service COINE will be designed to offer the following core services: – To enable people to tell and contribute their stories, knowledge and experiences to their local community through an interactive interface, – To offer them the capability to share this knowledge with other individuals through the exploitation of inter-community links

COINE – Implementation Challenges Seamless access to very highly distributed resources. Provision of a highly distributed metadata and data publishing platform.

COINE – Technical Approach From a technical point of view, COINE approaches this with the development of: –A Publishing Platform To provide the functionality for creating digital archives –A Resource Access Platform To provide access to digital archives

COINE - Publishing Platform The publishing platform will: – Enable the digitization of everyday objects (e.g. text, images, sounds, etc) – Enable the description of these objects with appropriate metadata – Be usable by citizens with no training or supplier intervention

COINE – Resource Access Platform The Resource Access Platform will provide: – A facility for searching across multiple repositories and consolidating the results – Query expansion through distributed thesauri – A facility for navigating descriptions of collections allowing for intelligent routing of queries and targeting queries

COINE – Application Scenarios All participating partners have developed a wide range of application scenarios, e.g.: – A Town's History (ENNIS) – Ireland – The History Center of Thessaloniki – Greece istorias.htm – LLETRA (Virtual Space for Catalan literature) – Spain

COINE – Anticipation The basic intention of COINE is to enable individuals and communities to tell their stories Thus, the basic Object of COINE has to be a Narrative encapsulating several Objects – Images – Sound – Video – etc

COINE – Narrative Template Anticipation Title: Title Authors: Author 1, Author 2, …, Author N Version: Version Number Status: Draft, or Final Date Of Creation: Date of Creation Date Of Last Modification: Date of Last Modification START of Narrative Narrative Text Area 1 – Start Text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text Narrative Text Area 1 – End Narrative Text Area 2 – Start Text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text text Narrative Text Area 2 – End. END of Narrative Metadata area for the Narrative Narrative area

COINE - Partners COINE brings together the following European institutions from across Europe – The Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) at the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, working with the Armitt Museum & Library, Ambleside, Cumbria (UK) – Fretwell Downing Informatics (UK) – The National Microelectronics Application Centre Ltd (Ireland)

COINE – Partners (…continued) – Ennis Information Age Town Ltd (Ireland) – The University of Macedonia (Greece) – Universita Oberta de Catalunya (Spain) – The Jagiellonian University, Krakow (Poland)

COINE – Web Site