The Future of Digital Memory and Cultural Heritage
October 16-17, 2003
Florence, Italy
http://galileo.imss.firenze.it/memorie_digitali/index.html
by Lloyd Rutledge
This conference was a series of talks by international digital archive
and cultural heritage experts with the aim of setting up an
understanding of the needs and goals of the topics. It had an
appropriately culturally impressive atmosphere, being held in Florence
cultural landmarks, with simultaneous translation for five languages,
all of which were used, with only a few talks originally in English.
It also left an impressively coherent and developed message: that the
large and important task of maintaining digital memory of cultural
heritage is becoming understood and appreciated by experts and
politicians, which is bringing us to a new phase with fewer short-term
projects and more sustained long-term maintenance. For us, fewer
projects means less of the nature of funding we're used to, and which
I was primarily there to find. However, of course, we gained from the
conference a better understanding the changing context from which
cultural heritage funding does come, and how we can address it.
The first of the four half-day sessions was in the Salone dei
Cinquecento of the Palazzo Vecchio, the main hall in the medieval
palace of the Medici's, and the Renaissance era main hall for the
city-state government, with enormous, dramatic paintings of victorious
Florentine battles that raise the question "Why did the foot soldiers
of Renaissance Florence not wear any pants?". This session's talks
were by somewhat more conservatively dressed local and less-local
politicians all expressing their and their government's commitment to
cultural heritage. Facts that continued to be brought up throughout
the conference were that both the previous Spanish presidency and the
current Italian presidency of the EU put cultural heritage high up on
the agenda and initiated what they called "initiatives". The
least-local politician was from UNESCO, saying that cultural heritage
was a global concern. Several speakers started by apologizing that
their originally-invited bosses couldn't speak instead, expressing in
flowery language their bosses's deep disappointment that they were
suddenly unable to attend a meeting that was so important to them.
The remaining three sessions were held in another landmark: the Teatro
della Pergola. One main theme was the already mentioned need for
sustained effort in place of different limited-term projects. No one
said what was going to be done about this. The need for advocacy came
up repeatedly, showing that not enough was currently happening for
sustained effort cultural heritage. Politicians and everyday citizens
don't seem to care enough. According to the Uffizi Gallery Guide
(from my own personal zero-th session for the conference) only 20% of
people ever see a museum. So why should they care?
One thing motivating the Europeans for sustained digital memory if
that the United States and Canada are ahead of us in developing it.
This is not just a competitive nudge but also an experience to learn
from about what works and doesn't. We had a talk about the NARA
project in the US that discussed this work.
Projects that had a large presence in the conference were DELOS,
ERPANET and Minerva. DELOS is an EU
Network of excellence on Digital Libraries, of which CWI is a
long-standing member. Costantino Thanos of DELOS worked the crowd. I
chatted with him as he pretended to remember me and claimed to
remember Arjen de Vries within the 20 seconds it took him to figure
out I wasn't important before moving on. He does, however, organize
productive workshops in memorable environments: such as when Frank
Nack and I first met in Santorini, with Joost and Gwendal.
The mission statement of Erpanet begins with "The
European Commission funded Erpanet Project will establish an
expandable European Consortium, which will make viable and visible
information, best practice and skills development in the area of
digital preservation of cultural heritage and scientific objects."
The Dutch National Archive is an Erpanet partner. From
www.minervaeurope.org: "The aim of Minerva is to create a network of
Member States' Ministries to discuss, correlate and harmonise
activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific
content, for creating an agreed European common platform,
recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term
accessibility and preservation." For those looking for an Italian
culture junket like the one I just had, Erpanet is holding a workshop
in Rome on November 17th and 19th, and Minerva is holding a conference
in Parma on November 20th and 21st. Erpanet is also meeting in
December in Lisbon and in March in Cork.
A key deliverable with the conference was the "Florence Agenda" made
by Erpanet and Minerva with the Italian Presidency and the EC. It is
a double-sided A4 describing three actions areas for bringing about an
"eEurope". DELOS is included as an "actor" on some action items. The
action areas are called:
- create awareness and cooperative mechanisms
- exchange good practice and develop a common point of view
- long-term policies and strategies
A presented on film archives chided the Netherlands for declining to
set up state archive of film. He challenged the upcoming speaker from
the Netherlands to defend Holland's position. This Dutch speaker,
Jacqueline Slats Digitale Duurzaamheid, just quickly said she had
nothing to do with the decision. Her talk was about the Dutch
government's commitment to keep 65% of its electronic documents in
indefinite storage for indefinite access by 2006. XML is a key
component of this strategy. She touch on another of the repeated
themes: the quick obsolescence of electronic media. This applies not
just to it physical containment, with the infamous problem of magnetic
tapes, but also to the possibility of its formats. She mentioned
work with IBM quite a bit.
Mario Mauro from the EP Culture Commission gave the discouraging
comment that the Commission was formed to "dream about things no one
will fund".
Other repeated themes include the importance of meta-data. Another is
how "curation" is both preservation and access. Preservation without
access tends to bring loss or damage to artifacts.
-Lloyd