Throughout the world cities after the fall of the totalitarian regimes deal with numerous issues that affect the everyday life of their inhabitants. The cities, which benefited from the economic direction of the totalitarian regime concerning selected sectors of the economy, may become sites on the periphery of events after several years. Conversely, the democratization of post-totalitarian societies associated with the opening of borders, free movement of persons, knowledge and technologies in a short time can affect the development of cities and towns stagnating in the previous era.
In our days, the importance of making valuable cultural content available on the Internet is increasing. Cultural institutions need to adapt to new user needs. The Minerva project - that Hungary joined from 2004 - was launched in order to coordinate and support digitisation activities at the European level. The project is based on the Lund Principles that were published in 2001. The programme of the project is known as the Lund Action Plan. The implementation itself started in 2002. For the supervision of the implementation of the principles, a permanent committee called the National Representatives Group was formed with the participation of experts from the member states. The individual tasks are carried out by international working groups that support the digitisation of cultural content by elaborating standards and guidelines. Hungary joined the MinervaPlus initiative in 2004 and its current involvement includes a study on the use of European multi-language websites and thesauri. The results show that 30,1% of the cultural websites in Europe are still published in one language only, 43,2% of them are bilingual and 26,7% are in multiple languages. The second or third language is most often English. There are 31 controlled vocabularies in the records so far. The final analysis of the results is expected in November 2004, after the meeting of the working group.
In our days, when nearly every cultural institution has a website, it is time to focus on quality. Quality does not only depend on technology, it is equally connected with well organized content, continuous maintenance and the monitoring of user needs. The EU-funded Minerva project defines ten quality principles for cultural sites. Sites should be transparent, effective, maintained, accessible, user-centered, responsive, multi-lingual, interoperable, managed and preserved. In March 2005, a quality test was carried out among six Hungarian cultural sites at the request of the Minerva working group on the quality of websites. All the examined websites have proved highly accessible and effective. However, the general challenges for the tested sites were the following: 1. Mission statement missing, or not on the front page 2. Crumbtrail, or sitemap missing 3. Multilingual equals with bilingual 3. Users are not involved by the planning 4. User-forums are missing 5. Problems with using metadata standards and OAI-PMH protocols 6. Media migration plan and disaster recovery plan are missing.
The European Union has launched the Minerva project in order to coordinate and assess the digitization activities of the Member States. The project is being carried out in the framework of a ministerial network and funded by the European Commission. The steering body of the project is the National Representatives Group (NRG) that assembles twice a year during each presidency. The current article presents the aims and functions of the NRG.
MTA SZTAKI and iKron Ltd. released a new integrated library management system called Hunteka in 2002. The development of the system is based on the authoress development plans and on the valuable feedback of Hunteka users. In this paper, a new Hunteka module is described, the e-Library, available as an independent software called JaDoX too, developed by iKron Ltd. This module helps and simplifies digitisation work from document processing through standardized storage to publishing on the Internet. JaDoX is a platform-independent document handling system based on open standards. JaDoX editor helps to transform unstructured text sources into TEI-based XML documents after recognition and proofing preparation. The results can be easily uploaded to the JaDoX server by one key press or mouse click. The JaDoX server stores the documents in relational database. It serves the documents for browsing, searching and publishing methods, which can be initiated on the web user interface.
By the opportunity of joining European Union, the authoress deals with the cultural identity and cultural heritage from the point of view of ethnology. According to her premise the traditional folk culture is considered to be a part of the national culture and as this it helps to constitute the cultural heritage of Slovakia. In the same time (as a fragment of the cultural memory) it interferes with a considerable part of the cultural identity and consciousness of the individual, communities and nation. In ethnographical and folkloristic areas she is looking for the answer to the question, what should be considered as cutural heritage and what are the possibilities of Slovakia to present it in the framework of ongoing processes of globalisation of European and world culture.
The article summarises scientific and publication and editorial activities of museology department in Bratislava during the last two years. It concentrates on their classification and basic evaluation with regards to museum theory, practice and Slovak historiography.
We examine the role and importance of scientific research in the process of obtaining and scientifically assessing the cultural heritage in museum as a memory institution. This research is a part of a complex approach to the phenomenon of documenting a society’s development and as such, it must give equal attention to tangible and intangible cultural heritage which is often difficult to do in practice. In this context, we focus our attention on eco-museums which aside from preserving and presenting also aim to at least partially revitalize cultural heritage in its natural environment.
This paper maps out the possibilities of using virtual and augmented reality in the context of virtual museums and galleries. In addition to the many advantages that virtual reality offers in new knowledge acquisition and presentation of cultural heritage objects, we also describe some possible disadvantages or problems directly related to this technology. Next, we try to find the answer to whether the presentation of selected objects of cultural heritage through virtual reality brings better results compared to the presentation in a traditional, museal form in the research part of the article. In conclusion, we summarise and present the results of the conducted research based on the statements of 138 students who participated in our testing.
In the article, the author focuses on showing the rich, yet little-known and disappearing, Polish cultural heritage in Latvia as a unique potential for cultural tourism. He presents some chosen buildings and places together with the evaluation of their availability and tourist attractiveness. The end of the article introduces an example tourist route which can be created in Latvia to attract Polish cultural tourist as well as to help to enliven and protect the facilities and places included in the route.
Virtual reality, cyberspace, 2D – 3D, anaglyf, avatar, digitisation of cultural heritage are concepts which represent only a handful of technological elements, which came into public´s awareness in the last 10 years. Cyberculture has had an impact on both the field of humanities and world cultural heritage, particularly in the form of virtual tours. The author of the study analyses cyberculture´s most important achievements in the field of education, presentation and protection of cultural heritage. This is supplemented by data directly from museums, with a whole range of applied elements. Cyberculture might also help with interpreting history, or in the protection of cultural heritage. The study also points out the limits of museum cyberculture based on technical and presentational activities from the period of 2012 – 2017.
A cultural park is one of the legal forms of historical buildings’ protection. It is brought to life in order to protect cultural landscape and to preserve areas of the outstanding scenic beauty with their immovable historical facilities characteristic for the local building and settlement tradition. Nowadays, there are twenty-one cultural parks in twelve provinces in the territory of Poland. Potentially, various types of tourism can take place there.
After the year 1989, political break brought complex of the changes, which influenced the whole every-day life in Slovak society. The case study shows how the transformation process together with the processes of a globalization and localization determined the local identity and local policy in one town, and shows the importance of local history and cultural heritage in the nowadays local policy.
The paper deals with the latest perspectives in cultural heritage research. It looks at reasons of an increasing interest in cultural heritage in the era of globalisation as well as at threats that turn heritage into a profitable commodity. It presents a number of cultural heritage definitions. All of them show cultural heritage as a bond between past, present and future generations that is preserved by transmission of knowledge of tangible and intangible cultural forms. The paper brings an overview of the latest theoretical approaches to the study of heritage and of the most frequent themes and topics in the research of cultural heritage in Europe.
The digital remediation of collections is also the dematerialization of these collections. Concurrently with large national and international projects of digitization of cultural heritage, family and personal possessions like photograph albums, videos and letters are also remediated. The meaning of these objects originated in their own context and is linked to their emotional surplus value. These collections participate in the creation of the identity of the proprietor. When cultural content loses its material medium, in some circumstances it loses also its aura – it is no longer an artefact.
A large number of studies within the social sciences have been devoted to the relationship between cultural heritage and cultural/ heritage tourism development in recent years and even decades. This area of study has been an object of interest for numerous disciplines, from economics, geography, sociology and history, to ethnology, sociocultural anthropology, museology and cultural studies. The study aims to present selected theories on cultural heritage and heritage tourism based on recent theoretical concepts, and to reflect their implementation within a particular national and regional context based on a case study of the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region, Slovakia.
The preservation of digital cultural heritage is a task that every country needs to take charge of. Digitally born cultural objects that are exclusively published on the Internet merit special attention, as these documents are the most fragile. The extent, as well as the complex and changeable nature of the Internet and its most popular service, the World Wide Web represent an extraordinary challenge from archiving point of view. Carrying out the task - or at least parts of it - needs to be based on the long-term and continuous collaboration of various partner institutions: public collections, especially the national library, major Internet and content providers, IT developer institutes and companies, as well as the appropriate governmental bodies. This paper gives an overview of the international issues of Internet archiving and proposes the first steps towards the creation of a Hungarian Internet Archive.
The article deals with the latest developments in the field of the digitisation of European cultural and scientific heritage. It presents the Dynamic Action Plan worked out by the National Representatives Group of the Member States, made up of experts of ministries and/or institutions engaged in cultural digitisation. It also examines the European Commission's Recommendations on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural content and digital preservation, as well as the Council's Conclusion on this topic. The author gives indications on the activities that a Member State - like Hungary - should pursue in order to meet the requirements of the Information Society in the cultural area.
The Virtual Library Eastern Europe has been launched as the result of a collaborative project of several prestigious academic institutions and with support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Besides the Ludwig-Maximilian University, this virtual library also supports research and studies related to the countries and regions of Eastern Europe. The portal offers a broad range of services and enhanced features to researchers and students. In addition to literature search, it provides full texts and allows for electronic publishing of texts. Events calendar, experts' database and educational resources are also included in the services. Future plans include the extension of services based on cooperative input from the partner institutions in Germany and other countries. Staff of the virtual research library is actively involved in the research work itself.
The common framework for the digitization of and online access to European cultural heritage, as well as for the preservation of European cultural materials in digital form was set out by two important EU documents issued in 2006. These documents lay down the principles for the creation of the European Digital Library. Over the past two years, the prototype of the multilingual portal called Europeana was established. It is expected that by 2010, 6 million digital records will be available through Europeana. However, we are only halfway towards ensuring the effective operation of the European Digital Library. EDL can only reach its full potential if a sustainable business model is elaborated for its future development. This paper gives an overview of the achievements in the field of digitization of cultural materials in Hungary and on the European level.
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