Paul Miller reports on a recent workshop in the programme of the Amsterdam Maastricht Summer University.
Amidst temperatures unexpectedly high for Northern Europe, some thirty people gathered in the Dutch city of Maastricht to spend three days exploring issues facing us in the move to make cultural heritage information widely available in digital form.
Perhaps best known in Europe for its treaty, Maastricht is in fact an ancient and lively city dating back to the Roman Empire, and associated more recently with Charlemagne and Marx. To this day, over 1,500 historic buildings fill the city centre, and medieval churches such as the impressive Romanesque Basilica of Saint Servatius loom over cafe-filled squares.
This workshop formed part of the extensive programme of the Amsterdam Maastricht Summer University [1], and was jointly initiated by the Summer University, the newly formed Dutch Digital Heritage Association (DEN), and the Maastricht McLuhan Institute (MMI), which also acted as our host in the city [2].
Of the participants, most came from across Europe, but individuals were also present from Russia, Africa, and from Indonesia. European countries outside the Union were well represented, including Estonia, Poland, Norway, and Romania.
The workshop began with a perspective from outside Europe. Patricia Young from the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) [3] presented some of the work done by this Federal government organization, and outlined a number of the experiences gained within CHIN since their creation in the early 1970s.
Seen by many as the pioneers in this field, CHIN began by hosting the collection management systems of various Canadian museums. With the falling price of hardware and software, and increasing knowledge of computing within museums, the role of CHIN gradually changed so that it no longer directly manages the collections of any member museum. Instead, CHIN offers advice and training, and a variety of union databases, each built from data contributed by member museums. These databases include the Great Canadian Guide [4], Artefacts Canada [5], and a wide range of frequently changing on-line exhibits [6].
The author then gave a presentation [7] in which a number of the key descriptive metadata developments, such as Dublin Core, of relevance to the cultural heritage sector were introduced. These developments are important if we are to move beyond the current trend whereby a small number of institutions make their proprietary internal systems searchable via a web interface towards a situation in which the holdings of many institutions can be made meaningful and useful to the remote user.
In a second presentation, Pat Young outlined the work of the J. Paul Getty Trust's Vocabulary Programme, of which she was Head until the end of 1998. The Vocabulary Programme is well known in a number of fields, and makes three main resources available for use locally and via the Web. These resources, which are continually updated, are the Art & Architecture Thesaurus [8], the Union List of Artist Names [9], and the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names [10].
Tools such as the Getty thesauri are often used as cataloguing aids, allowing the cataloguer to ensure that they have spelled terms correctly, or to enforce the selection of one preferred term over a variety of synonyms. Pat's talk, though, illustrated their equally important role as discovery tools for the end user. Imagine, for example, that a searcher wishes to recover the works of Leonardo da Vinci, but is aware that the artists' name is recorded differently by different people. Rather than having to manually submit each form of the name to the resources being searched — or require that each resource catalogue the name in only one form — use of a resource such as the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) allows the user to enter the name form that they know ("Leonardo da Vinci") and have ULAN automatically pass this and its alternate name forms ("L. Davinci", "Leonardo d'Avinci", and "Leonardo Davinci") to the resources being searched; thus retrieving records incoporating any of the alternate name forms for this single individual.
In his presentation, Kim Veltman of the Maastricht McLuhan Institute offered an inspiring vision of the potential for scholarship and the furtherance of knowledge in an environment where the resources of the cultural heritage community were widely and electronically available.
Backed by a wealth of slides (real ones, not Powerpoint!), and an impressive demonstration of his System for Universal Media Searching (SUMS), Kim showed much of what will be possible when we resolve our ongoing problems with technical issues such as metadata and distributed searching, and the political or human issues related to releasing the valuable information from within our cultural heritage "memory organizations" in the first place. It is useful to be reminded from time to time about what we are doing all this work for, and Kim's presentation served as one of those timely reminders.
Showing how one of the first museums to be represented on the World Wide Web continues to go from strength to strength, Pierre Coural of the Louvre in Paris demonstrated some of the work the Louvre is doing in terms of supporting school groups from outside Paris who are not always able to visit the Louvre in person.
Pierre demonstrated the site [11], and showed a variety of flexible ways in which the visitor can interact with a part of the Louvre's permanent collection. The user is able to search for art works based upon a number of criteria, and to assemble high quality images and associated text together for printing, or for inserting into course work in a variety of media.
Access to the site is currently restricted, with school visitors charged 5 French Francs (0.76 Euro, or about 50 pence) for a 36 hour visit and any associated support. This nominal charge, as well as financial support from a subsidiary of France Telecom and the French Ministry of Education, means that the start-up development costs of the site are likely to be met within a few years, allowing effort to then be expended upon new features.
Derek Law from the University of Strathclyde gave the last formal presentation, arguing both for the importance of cultural heritage institutions maintaining control over the rights they currently hold in their collections, and that the anarchic nature of the Internet makes it far from ideal as a medium for the dissemination of knowledge in any structured fashion.
The presentations were interspersed with periods of discussion, in which all participants took part. This discussion culminated on the final day with presentation of locally important issues by a number of the participants; a series of presentations which I sadly missed as I needed to return to the UK early for meetings.
Two points seemed especially interesting in the discussions. Firstly, Sandra de Wet from Museum Africa in Johannesburg suggested that it is proving cheaper to deploy Internet access into South African townships than to construct the infrastructure required to build museums and libraries in these areas. She also suggested that there is proving to be little or no resistance to the new technology here, unlike in more well-established areas where the population has come to expect interaction with physical libraries and museums, and their contents. What implications might either of these points have in Europe?
This workshop provided an opportunity for cultural heritage practitioners from around the world to gather together and debate some of the issues facing us as we move increasingly into a digital environment. Many problems were raised, and we perhaps started along the road to a number of solutions. I hope that some of the work started here can continue, in order that the wealth of Europe's cultural heritage can be made more accessible and useful to all.
Many thanks to Kim Veltman at the MMI for inviting me to speak at this event, and for his ceaseless hospitality during my stay; I can safely say that the finer restaurants of Maastricht are truly wonderful!
Thanks also to Rachel Feuchtwang of the Amsterdam Maastricht Summer University for her extremely efficient organization, and for the excellent care she took of all the speakers. The Anglo-/Franco-/Canadian squabbling over who could tempt her away with the most lucrative job offer was only half in jest!
If you have any comments on this article, please contact the editors (exploit-editor@ukoln.ac.uk).
Paul Miller
Interoperability Focus
UKOLN: < http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Tel: +44 1482 466890
Email: P.Miller@ukoln.ac.uk
Address:
UKOLN, c/o Academic Services: Libraries, University of Hull, HULL, HU6 7RX,
United Kingdom
 Paul Miller is employed as Interoperability Focus at UKOLN (the UK Office for Library and Information Networking). His responsibilities include advising on the development of interoperable solutions within and between such diverse communities as libraries, museums, and archives. |
For citation purposes:
Paul Miller, "Digital Cultural Heritage Workshop, Maastricht",
Exploit Interactive, issue 2, 20 July 1999
URL: <http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue2/maastricht/>
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