Sharing Europe's cultural heritage online
From the birth of modern civilisation in Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, Europe has acquired a great deal of riches along the way. The ability to share this heritage not only with Europeans, but also with others across the globe adds significant value. Currently, institutions must borrow collections from one another for short periods of time, but the arrival of the Internet holds great promise in extending beyond these conventional limitations. The Cultural Heritage Language Technologies (CHLT) project brought together several European and American universities to make this dream a reality. Central to the development of the Digital Library Collaborative Infrastructure (DLCI) was adherence to established industry standards. For instance, the ancient Greek, Latin and Norse texts that were the focus of the CHLT project were characterised according to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Description (FRBR) of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). This enabled the sharing of this metadata not only between CHLT partners, but also with high profile libraries around the world, such as the Library of Congress in the United States and the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Furthermore, use of the Z39.50 protocol enabled the DLCI designers to incorporate important tools into the DLCI, such as the Search Retrieval Web Service (SRW). The user interface is comprised of three components: a web-based catalogue system, a classical text server protocol and a WWW standards section based on the Open Applications Interface (OAI). Due to the cutting edge nature of this research, members of the CHLT consortium were subsequently invited to join in working groups (e.g. the CIDOC CRM ISO 21137 Special Interest Group, the IFLA FRBR Special Interest Group, etc.) to help define and develop new standards and protocols. The innovation does not stop here. The CHLT consortium has outlined future plans to introduce and exploit the benefits of GRID computing in establishing even better online access to our cultural treasures.
