Cooperation in the field of Exchange of Digital Collections and Cultural Content

I will briefly introduce the EC MEDICI Framework of Cooperation, originated under umbrella of the European Commission and grown up at international level after the start up period. Main projects care of MEDICI: information sharing, research projects, initiative in the field of education. A brief overview on recent MEDICI’s initiatives: “On culture in a world wide information society”, “Intangible heritage: a proper digital format”, “EU directives & cultural heritage”, “EU legislation & cultural heritage”, Planned conservation & “Monuments Integrated Management System”, “Long term preservation of digital content”, Monument’s ID Card & Visual documentation of monuments, cultural tourism 2.0 etc. MEDICI and the World Summit Award (section eCulture and Heritage). Starting from the main activities carried out by museums/archives: preservation, research, education/ dissemination we will outline the potential role of digital “objects”. Which are the role and the opportunities related to the use of digital technology in “memory institutions”? What do we expect from high end digital collections and from on line digital collections? How do we consider user generated content in this domain? How can we approach the global inventory and filing of digital originals, multilingual thesauri, specific ontology, international standards (text, visual, audio, audio/visual, etc)? Do virtual collections really provide added value to end-users? Are museums, content providers and users ready and willing to use new technologies to explore cultural heritage? Do ICT tools really help content holders and/or end-users? Shall we now try to provide some answers? Have we mastered the general framework? Is the necessary technological framework already in place? Are the requested competences and skills already available in this domain?