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News and Background Information on the Conference | |||
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Integrating Access to Museum, Library, Archive and Audio-Visual Collections
“To make the wealth of material in Europe’s libraries, museums and archives accessible to all” – This call by Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Information Society and Media, is behind the EDLnet initiative. EDLnet will concentrate on building partnerships between the cultural heritage domains. It is the first initiative to focus on providing a multilingual interface to digital artefacts, texts and media from across the European heritage. While the creators have a history of collaboration within their own sectors, the EDLnet programme is a departure because it draws key players from each and asks the fundamental question: What are the key professional, technical and semantic issues that we must resolve in order to collaborate effectively on delivering a prototype European Digital Library? The project will look at the political, human, technical and semantic issues that will contribute to the creation of an interoperable system able to access fully digitised content. It will invite feedback from different types of users in order to create a service that enriches the widest public possible and answers the needs of researchers, students, teachers and the creative industries. 
© Stephen Coburn, Fotolia.com One important impetus for the founding if the European Digital Library is users’ growing expectations. Users of Web 2.0 social applications – for example, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook – are used for calling up audio, images, video clips and text seamlessly in the same space. Inevitably in the coming years, they will demand similarly integrated access to the resources they need to investigate a school project, research a personal interest, complete a college thesis or write an article. Where the resources are located and which institutions hold them are likely to be irrelevant. Each domain has a different approach to metadata and the presentation and level of interpretation of its digital objects. In turn, users of their websites have different requirements and require different functionalities. To achieve interoperability between the approaches, and to identify the highest common factors in the behaviour of their users, is at the heart of EDLnet’s work. Funding for EDLnet comes from the European Commission as part of the eContentplus programme under the i2010 initiative. It is hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in the Hague, and builds on the progress of another pan-European project housed there, The European Library, of which it is a satellite project. Readers can keep in touch with EDLnet’s progress by visiting the website, Johnathan Purday will speak on Thursday, November 29th, from 16:30 to 17:30 in the November 6, 2007 |
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Jon Purday joined EDLnet in September 2007 on secondment from the British Library, where he was Head of Corporate Communications. Previous roles include communications manager for the British Library’s bibliographic services and for its digital programmes during the 1990s. He began his career as the first Curator of Recorded Literature at the National Sound Archive. He has been on secondment before – for a short spell in New York working on an archive of recorded poetry and, more recently, working on online communications at the Halifax, a major financial services provider. He is also a Chartered Member of the Institute of Marketing, Manchester Business School, and has taught communications in their professional development course.
