E-Culture Net is committed to sharing the enormous riches of Europe’s
digital culture for research, education and for all its citizens.
To achieve this, E-Culture Net is developing a) a Distributed
European Electronic Resource (DEER) for European Masters and Doctorates;
b) networks that provide content for the DEER and c) a research
matrix to update the DEER. The long-term goal is multi-lingual,
multi-cultural access to Europe’s heritage.
As a first step, members are sharing resources to create a prototype
for the DEER. All members agree initially to use these resources
only for research and education and specifically to develop new
European Masters and Doctorates in digital culture. The Distributed
European Electronic Resource (DEER) will have three main features:
1) Distributed Repository of European digital cultural
resources
2) Virtual Reference Room to make these accessible
to all the people of Europe
3) Forum for Collaborative Research and Creativity
for communication between researchers, content creators, the commercial
sector, and users: a virtual agora for European culture.
To keep the DEER up to date, members will contribute to the development
of research matrices. In the past, each medium had its own life
cycle: the production of manuscripts, books, film or video were
very different. In the digital age, the life cycles of all media
are potentially related. Needed are research
matrices that cover the whole spectrum of the knowledge life-cycle
ranging from technologies and infrastructure, content creators,
content holders, content brokers, context creators, content and
context communication, to applications and implications. Such research
matrices include both a macro-level for the big picture and a detailed
micro-level research matrix. These matrices bring into focus existing
solutions, standards, theoretical methods, critical thinking, teaching;
provide roadmaps for future research and help to understand potentials
for new employment and e-creativity in the knowledge economy.
E-Culture Net brings together those in universities, research
institutions, cultural organisations (museums, libraries and archives),
industry and Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). E-Culture Net
links with more specialised networks, emerging national
networks and international networks to provide a new vision
of European Culture in a global context.
E-Culture Net was a Thematic Network under the 5th Framework Programme
(IST-2001-37491) working to establish an European Network of Centres
of Excellence in FP6. Beginning from a group of 34 founding members,
it has grown in the past year to 132 members
with 5 new candidate
members. Building on the efforts for broadband connectivity through
GEANT,
E-Culture Net hopes to extend the vision of an E-Science Grid to
create a Grid for E-Culture as part of the European Research Area
(ERA) and thus give substance to the larger vision of E-Europe
(Lisbon, 2000).
...more
FP6 NoE Proposal:
Executive Summary (HTML|PDF)
