Identification of user needs, content and quality framework for common access points Working group

Coordinator:

Ministère de la Communauté Française (BE) - Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte (SP).

Objectives

The objective of this working group (corresponding to Minerva's working package WP 5) are to:

• Provide a shared vision of European cultural and scientific e-content by developing common quality criteria and framework.
• Establish criteria for internal and external sides of cultural web sites in order to preserve the European cultural heritage.
• Encourage the use of quality framework in cultural web sites by implementation and dissemination of the quality criteria.
• Facilitate the networking of cultural information.
• Encourage training actions in cultural websites.
• Promote knowledge of multicultural issues.

Description of work

The activities to be carried out by this workpackage mainly consist of identifying current solutions, identifying gaps and contributing to the development of a research agenda for future actions. The individual work items are:

• Definition of quality criteria
• Test and validation of criteria
• Awareness and information actions
• Training plans
• Cost/benefit analyses of quality criteria
• Evaluation of quality plan
• Development of a web-based platform to support the workgroup

Milestones and expected result

• Recommendations (starting from month 6): during the Danish Presidency
• Website and communication tools for the working group: in June
• Guidelines: long term
• Organisation of five meetings of the working group: 6th May 2002

New precisions on the project.

New approach of the quality concept:

• One product, the cultural website, with two aspects: internal & external
• Components = criteria, evaluation methods and directives to obtain the quality criteria

New categories of criteria and new criteria:

• Content
• Navigation
• Presentation & graphics
• Operation & services

Advantages of the quality framework within Minerva:

• Reference model for comparing/evaluating different cultural web-enabled products
• Development process of cultural websites (instructions for conception and development; evaluation and control processes)
• Evaluation of costs/benefits of the production and development of cultural websites
• Promotion of standardisation and interoperability of cultural websites
• Quality criteria at the disposal of users to increase the maturity of the cultural websites market
• Relevance of the creation of new cultural websites
• Educational tool for the different users' categories
• Cooperation between Member States and promotion for networks on quality problems
• Harmonisation and qualitative development of the promotion of the common European cultural heritage.

The users of quality framework

• Cultural institutions providing the content of cultural websites
• Political institutions responsible for promoting quality norms and coordinating the efforts in the cultural heritage field
• Project managers responsible for matching quality criteria
• Productors and evaluators of the cultural websites
• Final users
• Researchers

Quality criteria

From the end user's point of view:

• content
• navigation
• presentation & graphics
• Operation & services

From the system structure point of view:

• All the technical aspects " behind " the design
• Application quality

Content criteria

Quality of the content sources

• Institution content: data about the institution responsible of the website
• Intellectual content (domain): field of information about the topic
• Website content: information available on the website

Quality of the content organisation

• Criteria: content structure
• Sub-criteria: clustering effectiveness

Workplan

Quality group divided into 2 sub-groups:

• Users approach
• Technical approach

Implementation, dissemination
Evaluation

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