Multimedia Access to Europe’s Cultural Heritage : MEDICI’s experience since 1995

ICT is stimulating changes in the way most people earn their incomes; altering the balance between our roles as consumer and producers; changing the way we educate succeeding generation and train ourselves; changing the fruition of world’s cultural heritage; transforming the delivery of health care; altering the way we govern ourselves; changing the way we form communities; altering the way we obtain and communicate information; contributing to bridge some cultural or physical gaps; and modifying pattern of activity among the elderly. This is not a complete list of changes, but highlights some of the most prominent and important effects of ICT on our society. We are witnessing relevant changes due both to technological enhancements and modification of user requirements/expectations. In recent times the digital domain, once strictly populated by professional users and computer Scientists, open up to former digitally divided. Technology is evolving toward a mature “calm” phase, “users” are overlapping more and more “citizens” and they consider technology and eServices as an everyday commodity, to buy a ticket, to meet a medical doctor, to access weather forecast, to organise a visit to a museum or an archaeological site. It is a common understanding that recent generations represent a discontinuity if compared with the past ones. How do we identify a digital native? They are the eCitizens. This paper presents views of a society changing under the influence of advanced information technology through the experience carried out in seventeen years of activity of the MEDICI Framework. Computers have been around for about half a century and their social effects have been described under many headings.