The European Commission (EC) is not prepared to sit back and let
Google get a monopoly on the world's information, and is establishing a strategy to turn Europe's "historical and cultural heritage into digital content".According to an EC announcement on Friday, the aim is to digitise and preserve records of Europe's heritage — including books, film fragments, photographs, manuscripts, speeches and music — and make it available online to all European citizens. To make this happen, the EU is proposing high-level cooperation between the member states and has set a deadline of 20 January, 2006, for the first comments on the plans.
Launching the proposals, Viviane Reding, the Information Society and Media commissioner, said: "Without a collective memory, we are nothing, and can achieve nothing. It defines our identity and we use it continuously for education, work and leisure."
The Commission acknowledged that making the resources in Europe's libraries and archives available on the Internet "is not straightforward" and sets out three key areas for action; digitisation, online accessibility and digital preservation. It also acknowledged that several initiatives are already under way within Europe such as the Collect Britain project in the UK which is backed by the British Library and part-funded by the National Lottery.
The issue of collecting the heritage of the world, and in particular its literature, has come into sharp focus recently with Google's efforts to amass the world's knowledge in one search engine. That plan hit legal problems last month as Google came under attack for ''a plain and brazen violation of copyright law" by a group representing thousands of authors in the US.
A report in the Wall Street Journal on Monday said that Yahoo was about to launch a similar scheme, but with the specific permission of copyright holders.
Talkback
I'm sure France had something to do with this decision. Coinsodetally enough I just got an email back today from the Tate art gallery when I uploaded an example of one their pictures which I then filled full of meta-data like the artist, the story on that page, exhibition date and location etc... They seemed in agreement and were already considdering something like this, but its a question of resources.
The EC does have the resources but they can't do it all, they really should provide the finances to established areas of culture like the arts so they can devote their time and effort to digitise their often hidden archives.
I think its paramount that meta-data is heavily used and uniformly, already there is a standard software package from adlibsoft.com that is designed for museum archives but this is not available to the small galleries that really contain the nook-and-cranny sects of culture that can be lost, and the money to pay people to enter it.
I can see all the Luvre stuff getting in and the Tate but what about the £10,000 a year voulantry Generator Projects gallery, will they be a part of this? They should be, it has had some good stuff!
And what about the way people view the info, i've seen some bad UI's in my time and the EU website is nothing to should about, what about using something like Google Earth and have 3D buildings which can be zoomed into, and the work presented on the building walls on in desk draws, if an international effort were made to provide easy 3D design tools with maybe templates of houses put out by the planning department, many houses hhave a similar layout, argos could putup 3d models of their popular furniture and people could design their own houses like they do webpages now, scan their work in and just like flying past buildings I could go to someones house virtually and see their work presented in their room.
A bit far fetched, i dont think so, museums could go virtual, I hate seeing a Tate advertisement and being at the other end of the country, I want to pay the £4 entry fee and see it from my desktop, maybe chat to others there, buy a PDF booklet after, get temp access to their archive, have a cup of virtual tea and get some free TXT messages :)