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The World Wide Web Conference in Brisbane Australia in April -
http://www7.conf.au
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The WWW7 Multimedia and Cultural Tracks
A Digital Collection in Three Days? You bet!
At WWW7, a very special event will provide a unique opportunity for
cultural institutional experts and multimedia specialists to meet their
technological counterparts. Collaboratively, they will create, digitally
record and display a special collection of selected artefacts. In a series
of workshops they will share their knowledge of how to do this.
Photographers, curators, technicians, web developers and historians,
cataloguers and archivers will work together in a special venue at WWW7.
One part of the activity will be the making of the collection, the other,
the workshopping of issues, techniques and dreams associated with on-line
cultural institutions of the future.
The processes being employed will be recorded and carefully documented. The
experience, issues and concerns of administrators, lawyers, users and
curators will be canvassed and work-shopped by world experts as the digital
collection evolves. WWW developers and those who set standards will met
face-to-face with the everyday workings of the cultural communities for
whom they have developed many of the technologies. The digital recordings
will be available on the web as soon as they are created.
Leading examples of digital management systems will be prototyped and
available for consideration by participants. What is favoured and what is
not will be discussed. The deliberations will be reported in a brief for
work to follow in the 12 months before the next WWW conference in Toronto
in April 1999.
Who will participate?
Every registrant at WWW7 will be a potential participant. Why, and how? The
simplest form of participation will be adding one's shoes to the
collection! Those with deeper interests will participant in up to five full
days of activities: tutorials on metadata on the Tuesday 13th, and the
three-day tracks and then Metadata activities on Developers' Day, the 18th.
Others will choose to join selected sessions or participate in one or both
of two special days:
** International Museum Day - Thursday April 16 ** All interested in what
on-line interactions will be possible in the cultural institutions of the
future will find this a very special opportunity for them. What is possible
and what is desirable will be considered in a series of workshops and
presentations.
**International Metadata Day - Friday April 17 ** Those interested in the
development and use of metadata will be attracted especially to this day.
New developments in the fields of metadata and resource indexing and
discovery will be featured on this day. This will be an important follow-up
to National Metadata Day held in 1997 at the National Library of Australia
in Canberra.
One-day registration will offer full-access to all WWW7 events for that
day, including lunch and keynote addresses.
What is exciting about this project?
At one level the special tracks will be built around a fast
'exhibition-making' event. Even that will be fun. Objects to be included
will be photographed, videod, described, 'sniffed', maybe CAT scanned, and
all will be digitised. A collection with all the qualities of large
cultural collections will be assembled in cyberspace, with activities and
services for the WWW user prototyped and scoped.
At a deeper level, it is to be an integrating event around which many forms
and topics of interaction can occur. Most importantly, it brings together
the curatorial, cataloguing, archiving and other technical communities of
cultural institutions with those who invent, standardise, and sell the
technologies upon which those cultural communities depend. But it will also
involve those who develop content for the new media and those who will want
to enjoy and use the online resources.
After the event, a rich source of material about how to include artfacts in
WWW digital galleries will remain as a significant reference source. Small
and large institutions will be able to refer to information and people who
can help them participate in online cultural activity.
Where and by whom will the exhibition be digitised?
Developers and vendors of technologies of interest to cultural institutions
have been asked to demonstrate their wares, both the equipment and the
technologies, for the full three days.
The unique collection will, during the WWW7 period, be transformed into a
virtual collection. This process will be comprehensive, covering aspects
such as photography, video and audio recording of relevant information,
cataloguing and archiving of digital material generated. A digital studio
will be built and used to bring together the digital material. Suitable
web-serving techniques will be developed so the collection can be made
available in-house on high-bandwidth systems and remotely, via the web, on
lower band-width systems.
The virtual collection will be indexed and developed into the base for a
comprehensive cultural collection to which hundreds of museums will be
invited to add their token item the following week in Canada. Software
systems which make use of well-formed cataloguing information will be used
to develop Museum activities for future visitors, such as intelligent
Museum guides.
Photographers, audio and video recorders, journalists, cataloguers and
archivists, digital developers and computer technicians and researchers
will all be on hand to share their ideas and expertise with those who
choose to participate in presentation sessions during the conference.
Panels of experts will be engaged to work within three main streams of
interest - policy makers, curatorial and multimedia developers and
technologists.
For more information, please contact [log in to unmask]
or Liddy Nevile, ([log in to unmask])
phone +61 3 9660 3024
fax +61 3 9660 2761
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