DC-NET : Digital Cultural Heritage Network

The DC-NET project (contract no. 246618, http://www.dc-net.org/) aims to develop and to strengthen the co-ordination of the public research programmes among the European countries, in the sector of the digital cultural heritage. This scope will be pursued by the participating Ministries of Culture by endorsing a Joint Plan of Activities, to be initiated already during the project time-frame, through a wide and intensive programme of seminars, workshops, meetings and Presidential conferences dedicated to the encounter of the digital cultural heritage sector with the technological research and the e-Infrastructure providers in Europe.

The identities and distinctive features of most of societies are settled in their cultural heritage. Cultural heritage is strongly regional, particularly in Europe, comes in many different forms (books, paintings, sculptures, music, buildings) and is often language-dependent. The "Unlocking Culture" use case of PROMISE deals with effective information access to cultural heritage material held in large-scale digital libraries containing data from libraries, archives, museums, and audio-visual archives. The scenario we are facing is to be able to satisfy user information needs by retrieving relevant "cultural assets" irrespective of the media type, location or language in which information objects are expressed. Despite digital libraries are constantly growing and much research is carried out in the field, much less is done to establish standard evaluation criteria and methods.

PROMISE and DC-NET will cooperate through the cross-participation in training and dissemination events.

Such events will aim at:

•       Disseminating the PROMISE objectives and outcomes at ministerial level;

•       Identifying new evaluation methodologies of relevance for the Cultural Heritage community through the PROMISE calls for applications;

•       Raising the awareness of both other potential users and decision makers, through the presentation of the results of the PROMISE summer/winter schools, brainstorming workshops, and tutorial, about the usefulness of experimental evaluation for Cultural Heritage;

•       Liaising the Cultural Heritage community with those operating in the experimental evaluation.

DC-NET will fully exploit the collaboration with PROMISE providing complementary actions on those countries and/or institutes which are not already participating to PROMISE and PROMISE will help DC-NET in providing information on its objectives and outcomes in those countries participating to PROMISE and not to DC-NET.