1. INDICATE Final Conference
Ankara, October 2012
The INDICATE project
Antonella FRESA
Technical Coordinator
Central Institute Union Catalogue Italian Libraries 1

2. Table of content
The Digital Cultural Heritage sector: characteristics and needs
INDICATE project: objectives and activities
Legacy and future plans

3. Initiatives of European Member States in the last 10 year
Shared platform of recommendations and guidelines
Common data models and standards
Innovative online services (MICHAEL)
E-infrastructures for the citizens (EUROPEANA)
E-infrastructures for the research (NREN, NGI, data infrastructures)
International cooperation
+ Digitisation within national and regional programmes 3

4. The current situation Challenges and opportunities: Content growth
Technological needs
Preservation services
Access services

5. Content growth
The amount of digitised material is growing very rapidly
National, regional, European and world-wide programmes support digitisation of content of Museums, Libraries, Archives, Archaeological sites, Audiovisual repositories
More and more, cultural content are born digital
Digital cultural heritage is accelerated also by the impulse of Europeana that is fostering the European cultural institutions to produce even more digital content
Digital cultural heritage content are complex and interlinked through many relations

6. Technology requirements
High quality ITC facilities, to ensure
trust
reliability
scalability
long term safety of content
Interoperability
among existing cultural heritage repositories
between cultural heritage data and research data.

7. Two strands of services
Preservation
digitised content
born-digital content (databases, catalogues, files, etc.)
information associated with that content (‘infostructure’), i.e. the metadata
software applications and operative systems
Advanced access
for the researchers who search content for their research
for the cultural institutions that access data for management purposes

8. Digital cultural content International portals
Towards a DCH e-Infrastructure
Data Continuum
NATIONAL PROGRAMMES
REGIONAL PROGRAMMES
Digital cultural content
EUROPEAN PROGRAMMES
National portals
International portals
Regional portals
National portals
Thematic portals
……..

9. Key players Cultural Heritage: Research: e-Infrastructure providers:
Ministries of Culture
Cultural institutions
Cross-domain: museums, libraries and archives together
Research:
Ministries of Research
Researchers in the Humanities
Researchers in ICT applied to CH
e-Infrastructure providers:
NREN and NGI

10. Cultural heritage ICT research Arts & Humanities e-infrastructures
Cooperation and coordination among these sectors is at the core of an e-infrastructure for the Digital Cultural Heritage

11. Expected impacts e-Infrastructures Cultural Heritage Research
new scenarios of use and exploitation
Cultural Heritage
More advanced services - storage, preservation, access services for the cultural institutions, etc.
Research
better integration for multidisciplinary research
Other sectors
digital cultural content become more usable and re-usable for education, cultural tourism, long-life learning, creative industry, etc. 11

12. Constructing the DCH community
To define priorities among the services to be deployed
To consult and to advocated with stakeholders
To engage with programme owners
To improve awareness: standards, who-is-who, …
To promote trust building, covering different aspects and including organisational, operational and legal issues
To run experiments: pilots and use case studies
To open international cooperation
To establish the e-culture community

13. INDICATE – a concrete approach
September 2010 – October 2012
A project funded by EC FP7- Capacities e-Infrastructures
To foster the international cooperation of eInfrastructures providers and cultural heritage users
Target regions:
Mediterranean region, (Egypt, Turkey and Jordan)
Far East (China in liaison with the EPIKH Grid School, Taiwan, Malesia)
exchanges with South America

14. The consortium of INDICATE
10 partners from 8 countries:
Egypt
Center for documentation of cultural and natural heritage (CULTNAT)
France
Ministère de la culture et de la communication (MCC)
Greece
National Technical University of Athens (NTUA)
Italy
ICCU - The Coordinator
Consortium GARR
COMETA
Jordan
Department of Antiquities
Slovenia
Avtorska Agencija za Slovenijo Doo
Spain
Fundacio privada I2CAT, internet i innovacio digital a Catalunya
Turkey
Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı

15. Key actions
Pilots and case studies as demonstrators of the processes relevant to establishing cultural initiatives on the e- Infrastructure platforms
Coordination of policy regarding the use of e- Infrastructures for digital cultural heritage in countries all around the Mediterranean
Dissemination and contribution to the establishment of the Digital Cultural Heritage Community 15

16. The workplan Management (Wp1)
Developing a network of common interest (WP2)
Research pilots and case studies (WP4 & 5)
Strategies and future plan (WP6)
Dissemination (WP3) 16

17. Pilots
To study and to experiment the migration of two existing e- Culture applications to the e-Infrastructure platforms:
Semantic Search pilot
e-Collaborative Digital Archives
The experience gathered within the pilots was analysed and becoming a key input to the best practice work.
The pilots are accessible via the eCulture Science Gateway that allows to create and to manage digital repositories on the Grid 17

18. Case studies
To analyse the potential for e-Infrastructures to be used to overcome long-standing problems in e-Culture
Three key problems have been address, each one supported by a dedicated workshop:
Long Term Preservation (Ankara workshop in July 2011)
Virtual exhibitions (Amman workshop in December 2011)
Geo-coded Digital Cultural Content (Ljubljana workshop in February 2012) 18

19. The network of common interest
It combines:
regional, national and international levels,
bottom-up (working groups) and top-down (Joint Programming) approaches
Working groups:
experts seconded by their cultural, research and infrastructure organisations
Cooperation with other networks and projects:
EPIKH, CHAIN, EUMEDGRID-Support, EUMEDCONNECT2, LINKED HERITAGE

20. The legacy of INDICATE
INDICATE completes its activities this month with an important legacy, made of:
Cloud-enabled semantic pilot
eCulture Science Gateway, providing seamless access for cultural heritage people to the grid
Case studies
Handbooks
Network of people and organisations sharing common interests
INDICATE policy paper: the Paris Declaration

21. The future
The project belongs to a family of projects that are investigating and testing how the digital cultural heritage can exploit the facilities and services offered by the research infrastructures. The Paris Declaration is our policy framework for the future actions.
A new project started on 1/10/2012, to focus on the development of a Roadmap for the digital preservation of cultural heritage data.
The Network of Common Interest is the living body that will sustain the future activities, towards the implementation of the e- infrastructure services for the Digital Cultural Heritage community

22. Thank you
Antonella Fresa INDICATE Technical Coordinator