World Heritage Exchange Generates Significant Interest
Ed Froese, President of ACT, and Tim Bramwell, Director of Sales, recently returned from a trip to Eastern Canada and Europe, where they had a variety of meetings with people and organizations interested in the World Heritage Exchange. There is significant interest in the system and its capabilities. Some of these opportunities are listed below.
CHIN
ACT has had some involvement with CHIN (The Canadian Heritage Information Network) for several years. Located in Ottawa/Hull, CHIN maintains a central textual catalogue of the collections of Canadian Museums. CHIN’s catalogue contains only text information and they now have interest in a partnership with ACT through which their catalogue would reference image collections stored on ACT servers. These collections would then be made available to the public on a royalty-sharing basis.
Lyon Textile Museum
This museum, in Lyon France, has a large collection of digitized images of historic textile patterns. They provide a service whereby persons can browse through their collection, select patterns, and then secure exclusive rights to use of the pattern for a specified period of time. They are interested in making this service available over the Internet (currently people must visit them in person), and ACT’s software could easily accommodate their requirements.
Alinari Archives
The Alinari Archives, located in Florence Italy, have one of the oldest and finest photographic archives in the world. They have literally millions of historical photographs and are currently in the process of digitizing portions of their collection. They are in the business of selling photographs and so are interested in methods for selling images over the network.
McMillan Interactive Publishing
McMillan Interactive Publishing has a new comprehensive dictionary of art. The dictionary is currently in printed form and they are in the process of producing an on-line version. They would like to provide pointers from the dictionary into on-line image archives such as those currently available through the World Heritage Exchange.
LRMF
The LRMF (Laboratoire de Recherche des Musees de France) is one of the partners in the VISEUM project. Located at the Louvre, in Paris France, they currently have over 38,000 images of works of art digitized. There is currently a strong movement in France to allow commercial access to these materials.
TI
ACT signed a memorandum of understanding with TI Telecomunicazioni & Informatica of Rome Italy in 1996. The Italian Ministry of Culture recently announced that they would be providing 250 billion Lira (approx 200 million Canadian dollars) of funding over the next 5 years for culture and technology applications. This has lead to strong interest on the part of TI for joint activities with ACT accessing these funds.
NSM Jukebox
ACT has an ongoing relationship with NSM Jukebox, located in Bingen Germany. NSM is the world’s leader in the manufacture of CD-Rom jukeboxes, which provide an excellent storage and retrieval system for multimedia data. They are currently developing jukeboxes to work with DVD (digital versatile disk) technology, which provides approximately 7 times as much information on a singe CD.
Other Opportunities
There have been a number of expressions of interest from other organizations as well, both within Canada and in Europe. There are also opportunities developing in the Far East. A delegation from Japan recently visited ACT.