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Digital Libraries
Context
Libraries, museums and archives face huge challenges in the way that they acquire, preserve and offer access to their collections in the digital age. With more and more digital resources, both results of digitisation and digital originals, new issues are raised in terms of cataloguing, search and preservation.
The value of libraries in the Internet area lies not only in their own resources but they also serve as gateways enabling the public to access collections in other cultural institutions. This raises major challenges in terms of content management, namely how to provide users with seamless, high value, interactive services based on these distributed resources.
A policy initiative for Europe's digital resources
On 30 September 2005, the Commission published a Communication presenting digital libraries as a flagship in the context of the i2010 policy initiative. It proposes a concerted drive to digitise, preserve, and make Europe's cultural heritage available to all, and presents a first set of actions at European level. On 24 August 2006, the Commission adopted a Recommendation which calls on EU Member States to act in various areas, ranging from copyright issues to the systematic preservation of digital content in order to ensure long term access to the material.
More details on policy activities can be found on the Digital Libraries website.
EU-funded research
The key objective of Community funded research in the digital libraries field is to establish a European cultural space based on interoperable platforms and standards. Projects initiated over recent years have provided progress in this respect, establishing standards, technical guidelines and management frameworks. The IST Programme is supporting RTD into new ways of representing, analysing, manipulating and managing cultural objects in the digital environment. The work addresses technical and organisational issues regarding distributed collections and large-scale digital repositories. This includes content management and long-term preservation. Models for future virtual collections and guidelines for integrating real and virtual objects and collections are also emphasised.
The EU has been supporting research into digital libraries for many years. Examples from the 5th Framework Programme (1998-2002) are AMICITIA, ARION, BOOKS2U!, BRAVA, CHLT, COLLATE, CYCLADES, ECHO, EULER, LEAF, META-E, MIND, ORIEL, RENARDUS, SCIX or TEL (The European Library). For information on their work please open the project page of the DigiCult website.
Objectives under the 6th Framework Programme (2002-2006)
The work on the digital library involves a new architecture and above all the integration of technology components into an operating whole. Significant contributions will be made on decentralised management of content, document standards, test metrics, user profiling, personalisation, and user-centred testing.
FP6 projects addressing digital libraries
Two early projects funded under the 6th Framework Programme have facilitated the co-ordination of digitisation initiatives and digital services on national or local level: MINERVA and CALIMERA. The TEL-ME-MOR project supported the National Libraries of the ten new EU Member States of 2004 in becoming part of The European Library (TEL).
Ongoing research and development projects are focusing on improving access to digital resources and their preservation over time.
PRESTOSPACE investigates digital preservation of film heritage. Two large-scale projects will test OAIS-based systems and tools to support longer-term availability and accessibility of multi-sourced and multi-formatted resources (CASPAR) and to integrate preservation functions and services into organisational workflows and processes (PLANETS). DPE - DigitalPreservationEurope is working towards coordination of national activities in preservation - focusing on advocacy, certified repositories, and mobilising centres or networks of competence.
Research projects targeting application areas such as digital libraries and archives will create methods and tools for (semi-)automatic indexing and semantic annotation of non-textual objects (music, speech, images). At the same time, they aim at improving information and knowledge retrieval through efficient search engines and user interfaces that will be able to deliver results from complex multimedia resources, from distributed collections and across languages. Ongoing projects: BRICKS, CONTRAPUNCTUS, DELOS, EASAIER, IMAGINATION, MEMORIES, MOSAICA, MultiMATCH, P2P-Fusion, QVIZ.
For more information on the projects mentioned, please open the project page of the DigiCult website.