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ERPANET
KERKIRA SEMINAR
Preservation of web material
22-24 May 2003
Pierluigi
Feliciati
Minerva WP5 and National Archives of Italy
Quality Guidelines for Public Cultural Web Applications and the managing of their contents:
Abstract
The Minerva
project (Ministerial NEtwoRk
for Valorising Activities in digitisation),
funded under the IST Programme and coordinated by the Italian Ministry
of Culture, acts as a secretariat for National Representatives Group
meetings and for implementing the Lund Action Plan. Its aims are to
coordinate a common platform and to produce guidelines and recommendations
for national digitisation policies, with a special attention to contents
quality, access and long-term preservation. Within Minerva experts
workgroups, since March 2002 the Working Package 5 has focused its
activity on Web sites, in order to define a quality framework of criteria
for cultural applications.
The geometric increasing of cultural Web
sites wasn't matched to a full awareness of the new medium and their
contents were often put in sort of show-cases, bad imitations of the
dot.com world experiences.
The conservation institutions should avail
of a full use of the powerful medium of WWW, in order to promote the
effective widening of civil community's participation to conservation
policy. In this direction, the public cultural entities should be
in the front line for the challenge of increasing Web quality, being
the landmark to turn present flow-knowledge effects from
disorientating to orientating.
Starting from these premises, the Minerva
WP5 is presently working to the redaction of a Handbook of
Quality for Public Cultural Web Applications, to provide
a concrete tool for Web promoters, developers and evaluators and come
out from the experimental Web Era with the help of concrete guidelines,
crossing public entities' conservative mission and users' needs.
To
work out such aims the Handbook singles out 12 Web Application
goals, from the transparency on cultural subject's activity
to the diffusing of cultural contents, from the museums reservation
to the scientific research services. For each goal are defined and
commented the proper quality criteria, both from
the content and from the technical point of view, with attention to
the specificity of cultural categories (archival, librarian, artistic,
archaeological, etc).
A draft version of the Handbook will be exposed
at next NRG meeting next June, in Kerkira's Workshop on Digitisation
of Cultural Heritage, and submitted to European cultural community
to collect suggestions. At the International Minerva Conference of
Parma (I) on Web Quality (20-21 November 2003) the Handbook will be
presented in a definitive version.
Among the basic principles opening
the Handbook we planned a recommendation on long-term preservation
of web content: one of the main goals of public cultural subjects
is to turn the anti-historical tendency of cyber-world upside down,
providing the dissemination of guidelines and best practices for long-term
preservation of Web contents. This activity must concern both the
site developing process and its maintenance, with attention to the
proper standards and techniques. The Kerkira ERPANET Seminar conclusions
will be the basis for this recommendation. |
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