READ provides a 15 month evaluation of iRODS (software system for digital libraries and persistent archives), within the context of the UK e-Science activities and initiatives through five main work-packages: a demonstration implementation, an evaluation for fine-grained role-based, an assessment of the maturity for integration with existing UK e-Science security infrastructures, analysis of the capabilities for integration with existing systems and finally wide-scale dissemination and technology transfer of the project results.

ISAAC - Integrated e-Services for Advanced Access to Heritage in Cultural Tourist Destinations.

ISAAC's main objective is to valorise the relationship between digital heritage and cultural tourism by developing a novel user-centric ICT environment for tourism e-services. These services will meet the needs of both tourists and citizens in European cultural destinations through facilitating virtual access and stimulating learning experiences with European cultural heritage assets before, during and after a real visit.

The physical deterioration of manuscripts and archive material is a major loss to European cultural heritage. This 24 month CRAFT project will realise a new technique for the virtual restoration of degraded texts. Multispectral imaging will reveal hidden features in a damaged document, and the digital image will be enhanced with various image-processing techniques to increase the readibility of the text for OCR software. The project will then research keyword abstraction and archiving of documents, for presentation in a user-friendly interface. The consortium includes 6 SMEs (two suppliers of equipment and software, and four end users) and three RTD performers with research expertise in digital imaging and spectroscopy, different techniques of image enhancement and optical character recognition. Each of the SME end users will collaborate with national and regional libraries and archives, who will supply degraded documents in order to test the prototype system.

iTACITUS - Intelligent Tourism and Cultural Information through Ubiquitous Services. iTACITUS will enable the customisation of personalised walking and public transport aware tours in urban areas facilitating novel cultural experiences based upon AR and VR technologies and on a dispersed repository of historical and cultural resources. These resources will be exploited by a combination of location-based and location-independent services delivered in a flexible and timely fashion.

KALEIDOSCOPE - Concepts and methods for exploring the future of learning with digital technologies KALEIDOSCOPE was funded as a Network of Excellence for establishing a coherent and strong European Research Area in the technology-enhanced learning domain. It adopted a multidisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective and contributed to shaping the scientific evolution of technology enhanced learning. The network succeeded in integrating the leading research teams in the field and has created a community of more than 1 000 researchers, covering a large range of expertise from educational, social, cognitive and computational sciences. Among the project's activities were sharing of knowledge and tools, developing agreed vocabularies, a common theoretical framework and methodologies and identifying important research issues. Other issues were training of researchers, and exploring innovation and commercialisation of research.

Project from Germany, funded by German Ministry of Education and Research. Goal of the Kopal project is to develop a technological and organizational solution to ensure the long-term availability of electronic publications. The materials will range from digital documents in form of PDF, TIFF, or TeX files to complex objects like digital videos. In one work package it will be developed a sustainable plan for preservation planning in order to deal with the identification of digital objects which, due to technological change, would otherwise no longer be accessible. The required strategies for storage, migration, and emulation will be developed by the project partners.

British project, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).LIFE is a project which aims to apply the theory of life cycle collection management to digital collections. The project will provide practical information for all institutions who have an interest in collecting and preserving digital material.

LIFE2 is the second phase of the LIFE project, running for 18 months from March 2007. LIFE2 aims to refine the LIFE methodology adding four new exemplar case studies to further build upon LIFE1

LIVE will produce a multi-stream TV broadcast of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing which adapts in real-time to the interest of the viewers. For this innovative TV experience, incoming video signals and archive material will be indexed and structured by semi-automatic metadata extraction tools. The LIVE system will also be capable of analysing feedback on preferences of TV consumers and use it as guidance during the production process.

LiWA will develop and demonstrate web archiving tools able to capture content from a wide variety of sources, to improve archive fidelity and authenticity and to ensure long term interpretability.

LOCKSS ("Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe") is open source software that provides librarians with an easy and inexpensive way to collect, store, preserve, and provide access to their own, local copy of authorized content they purchase. Currently, more than 80 libraries and 50 publishers from around the world are using the software. In addition, the Stanford LOCKSS team is collaborating with institutions through the LOCKSS Alliance to further collection, technical, and community development.

Multilingual Content Aggregation System based on TRUST Search Engine
(eContent Project No. EDC 22249 M-CAST). The aim of the project is to develop a multilingual infrastructure enabling content producers to access search, and integrate the assets of large multilingual text (and multimedia) collections, such as internet libraries, resources of publishing houses, press agencies and scientific databases.

MEMORIES - Design of an audio semantic indexation system allowing information retrieval for the access to archive content. MEMORIES will design an OAIS-based application combining computer assistance for developers of audio databases and a smart search engine for audiovisual information retrieval.

The METAe Engine - marketed by CCS GmbH. under the brand name docWorks/METAe Edition is a innovative, effective and user-friendly software which understands the structure and layout of documents and translates it into reach XML files. METAe dramatically eases the digitisation process of printed material especially from the 19th and 20th century.

The MICHAEL (2004-2007) and MICHAEL Plus (2006-2008) projects were funded through the European Commission’s eTen programme, to establish a new service for the European cultural heritage. The MICHAEL project was a partnership between France, Italy and the UK to deploy a cultural portal platform that was developed in France. MICHAEL Plus then extended the MICHAEL project to the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. The two projects are closely aligned. The projects focus on the integration of national initiatives in digitisation of the cultural heritage and interoperability between national cultural portals to promote access to digital contents from museums, libraries and archives. The projects have established this international online service, to allow users to search, browse and examine descriptions of resources held in institutions from across Europe.

EU project funded by Sixth Framework Programme. The overall objective of MICROHOLAS is to implement the microholographic technique for optical storage on CD/DVD-like disks for digital data. The project aims at long-term storage by utilizing periodic nanostructures in the disk volume rather than on the surface as in conventional optical storage systems. At the end of the project a microholographic storage disk and a demonstrator device will be available which will have been successfully tested for archival storage.

Internal project of National library of the Netherlands. In 2006 the Migration Research Project was carried out. Its purpose was to come to a better understanding of the possibilities, risks and consequences of migration. The project involved studying file formats that were to be migrated, the process of conversion and migration procedures. The project resulted in: - The recommendation that e-Depot publications now in MS Office and WordPerfect format be normalised as PDF/A files. - Increased knowledge of conversion software and the testing of such software. - An international migration knowledge network.

MINERVA has been the project for creating a network of European Ministries, coming from EU and other countries, aiming to support the implementation of eEurope and the Lund Action Plan, for harmonising national policies concerning digitisation of cultural and scientific content. The National Representatives Group appointed by Member States will start an open discussion across Europe, identifying and comparing practices and standards, collecting information on inventories, metadata, contents, archives, etc. Project Reference: IST-2001-35461 Contract Type: Thematic network contracts Action Line: IST-2001-8.1.2 Networks of Excellence and working groups,2001-8.1.2 Networks of Excellence and working groups

MinervaEC is a proposal for a Thematic Network in the area of cultural, scientific information and scholarly content. It is intended as a strategic network, bringing together stakeholders and experts from all the EU Member State, capitalising the results achieved by the IST Minerva project, supporting the Dynamic Action Plan of the NRG launched in Bristol on 16th November 2005, and the proposals by France and the European Commission to develop a European Digital Library. Its goal is to support the creation of added value products and services at European level to improve awareness of the state-of-the-art in the sector, to contribute to the overcome of fragmentation and duplication of digitisation activities of cultural and scientific content and to maximise synergies among Member States.

MinervaPLUS has enlarged thematic network of European Ministries (MINERVA, Project Reference: IST-2001-35461) to discuss, correlate and harmonise activities carried out in digitisation of cultural and scientific content, for creating an agreed European common platform, promoting recommendations and guidelines about digitisation, metadata, long-term accessibility and preservation. The project has been strongly based on the principle of embeddedness in national digitisation activities and has included also new EU Member States, Russia and Israel. Project Reference: 507083 Contract Type: Coordination action Action Line: IST-2002-2.3.1.12 Technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage

MOSAICA - Semantically Enhanced, Multifaceted, Collaborative Access to Cultural Heritage. MOSAICA is all about creating a colourful and diversified mosaic of cultures, traditions, and legacies that will grow and evolve, enabling varied actors to use technological means to express their national, ethnic and religious identity, values, and legacy.

This study will also investigate the way that digital sound and moving pictures files are being preserved, as well as determining archiving methodologies and future research possibilities. This study includes both "born digital" and digitised material.

n the web, cultural heritage content is everywhere, in traditional environments such as libraries, museums, galleries and audiovisual archives, but also in popular magazines and newspapers, in multiple languages and multiple media. The aim of the MultiMatch project is to enable users to explore and interact with online accessible cultural heritage content, across media types and languages boundaries. For more information click here MultiMatch is developing a multilingual search engine specifically designed for access, organisation and personalised presentation of cultural heritage information.

NEDLIB is a collaborative project of European national libraries. It aims to construct the basic infrastructure upon which a networked European deposit library can be built. The objectives of Nedlib concur with the mission of national deposit libraries to ensure that electronic publications of the present can be used now and in the future.
Project NEDLIB aims to construct the basic infrastructure upon which a networked European deposit library can be built. The objectives of NEDLIB concur with the mission of national deposit libraries to ensure that electronic publications of the present can be used now and in the future.

The project's objective is to create a network of expertise in long-term storage of digital resources for Germany. As the perspective of current and future archive users is central to the project, the emphasis is put on long-term accessibility. Within the project the following offers will be created: a web-based information forum, a platform for information and communication, criteria for trusted digital repositories, recommendations for certification procedures of digital repositories, recommendations for collecting guidelines and selection criteria of digital resources to be archived, guidelines and policies, the concept for a permanent organization form of the network of expertise in digital preservation.

The National Grid Service (NGS) aims to provide coherent electronic access for UK researchers to all computational and data based resources and facilities required to carry out their research, independent of resource or researcher location.

This project will aim to identify every repository of digital content that is free to UK HE institutions and hosted within the UK, whether it is presented as an archive, Content Management System, repository, or Web-based collection, using a detailed review of previous research done in this area and by aggregating resources referenced by online portals and reports and reviews.
Presently, the project has moved into phase 2 which will last until June 2008. This period will be used to increase the records collected by the inventory and to enrich the data in the records.

The OpenEvidence (IST-2001-35174) project responds to Action line IV.3.3 of the EU 7TH IST call as a take-up action, to foster in Europe a critical mass of development of free software. The project begin was April 1st 2002. OpenEvidence produces technology for evidence creation and evidence validation in a context of electronic or dematerialised documents and activities, based on current and emerging technologies for digital signatures, key management, time stamping, archiving and notary systems and standardised document formats. In this context evidence should be understood as a document certified by some authority that guarantees the data it, contains. The authenticity of the evidence must be easily verifiable, as well as when it is obtained and, often, long time later by any relying party. As a necessary but not sufficient means for validation the evidence needs to be signed and time-stamped.

The P2P-FUSION project develops a new software system, Fusion, that supports audiovisual creative activities and makes it easy for anyone to create, reuse and share audio and video productions over the internet legally, without costly servers and complicated system management. Fusion binds together a peer-to-peer network, a distributed semantic database, social enrichment features, audiovisual production and editing software, support for embedded licenses and a social media application toolkit into an integrated easy-to-use solution.

PAPYRUS aims at creating a cross-discipline digital library engine that allows for drawing content from one domain and making it available and understandable to the users of another.

PAST aims to develop an innovative ICT system supporting visitors of Archaeological Sites. Visitors will use handheld PCs (operated via voice commands, touch screens and text-to-speech) connected to a local Server via wireless networks.The Server will include an Archaeological Repository, storing data and information relevant to PAST, and a Legacy System Integration Layer, exporting relevant data from legacy archaeological multimedia databases to the PAST system. Servers installed at remote sites will be networked via Internet: each PAST instance will be able to seamlessly access information residing in any other instance, therefore creating a distributed information space.The PAST Server will also include: a Visitors Profiler, collecting static and dynamic information about visitors, tracking interactions with the PAST system, and building and dynamically revising profiles; a Visit Organiser, which, based upon the visitors' profiles, the current context of the visit and the informatio

The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (paradigm) project sees the major research libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Manchester come together to explore the issues involved in preserving digital private papers through gaining practical experience in accessioning and ingesting digital private papers into digital repositories, and processing these in line with archival and digital preservation requirements.

Planets - Preservation and Long-term Access to our Cultural and Scientific Heritage The primary goal for Planets is to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to digital cultural and scientific assets. The project will deliver an integrated production environment for the management of digital information preservation, with a special focus on the needs of libraries and archives. (IST-2005-2.5.10 )

Germany, funded by German Research Foundation. For the purpose of this project the archives of five political foundations in Germany have joined Forces. The project aims not only to create new Internet archives but also to develop exemplary procedures that can be adapted by others.

EU project, funded by JISC (The Joint Information Systems Committee). The basis for the project is Eprints, which is software for building institutional repositories. The aim of the project is to develop “infrastructural digital preservation services for institutional repositories”.

Preserv 2 is a JISC project investigating and developing infrastructural digital preservation
services for institutional repositories. Project partners are SouthamptonUniversity,
The National Archives, The British Library and Oxford University.
Building on the PRONOM-ROAR service developed in Preserv1 that identifies format
profiles for 200+ repositories, Preserv2 will investigate
structured process for active preservation aimed at repository content:
characterisation identification, validation, and property extraction;
preservation planning (e.g. risk assessment); preservation action
(e.g. migration including validation of the results).

The objective of the project is to provide technical devices and systems for digital preservation of all types of audio-visual collections. The partners have analyzed the different steps of preservation work towards access according to archives practices and to the required skills and technologies. The main production chain is the migration from analogue to digital material, (e. g. including: digitization process, restoration, longterm storage, production of metadata).

PROTAGE will develop and introduce agent-based technology and methodology that facilitates preservation-friendly content production, transfer and ingest. The project will also facilitate archival monitoring and user’s access to information in various contexts by finding information relevant to user’s needs and preferences.

QVIZ - Query and context based visualization of time-spatial cultural dynamics. QVIZ is a project started in order to bring users a single entry point to the archives of Europe. A common starting point that allows browsing of the archival resources through time and space using a dynamic map or contextual categories. The map interface locates the resources without the need of knowledge concerning the language that the resource keeps or which institution that holds the records. In addition to this, QVIZ also provides an environment for collaborative knowledge building with social bookmarking for interested users.

File Format Representation and Rendering Project, which aimed to develop tried and tested technologies, conceived by the Cedars and CAMiLEON projects. Survey and assessment of sources of information on file formats and software documentation, Final report produced by the Representation and Rendering Project, University of Leeds, (undated)

This project will develop and test a next generation digital preservation framework including tools for analysing, ingesting, managing, accessing and reusing information objects and data across libraries and archives.

The SHERPA DP project ran from 2005 - 2007 and was funded as part of the JISC Digital Preservation and Asset Management programme. The purpose of the project was to investigate a disaggregated service model and assign rights and responsibilities.
During the project the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) developed a practical preservation environment compliant with the OAIS Reference Model, that serves the preservation requirements of several e-print archives in the SHERPA consortium.

The Sherpa DP2 project will develop a full preservation environment capable of serving a range of diverse repositories and content types. It will extend the test-bed collaborative service developed for the SHERPA DP project, to consider a range of different repository archiving models.

STARGATE - Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit.

The STARGATE project will explore the use of static repositories as a means of exposing publisher metadata to OAI-based disclosure, discovery and alerting services within the JISC IE and beyond.

TAPE (Training for Audiovisual Preservation in Europe), funded under the Culture 2000 programme of the EU, is a 3-year project for raising awareness and training by expert meetings, research, publications and workshops. TAPE focuses on audiovisual collections held outside the major national institutions with specific responsibilities for audiovisual heritage. Through a programme of activities TAPE aims to explore the requirements for continued access to audiovisual materials and the application of new technologies for opening up collections that provide living documentation of the world of the 20th century.

TEL is a cooperation project of eight European national libraries as well as the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL). Result of the TEL project is The European Library, a web service with integrated access to collections of European national libraries. Project Reference: IST-2000-25347 Contract Type: Preparatory, accompanying and support measures Action Line: 2000-3.1.4 Access to digital collections of cultural and scientific content

TEL-ME-MOR - The European Library: Modular Extensions for Mediating Online Resources.

This project supported the National Libraries of the ten new EU Member States of 2004 in becoming part of The European Library (TEL), a networked service that provides unified access to the electronic resources of many National Libraries across Europe. TEL-ME-MOR also included activities in the new Member States to raise awareness on the opportunities for participation in EU-funded IST research.

TELplus is a Targeted Project for digital libraries supported by CENL (the Conference of European National Librarians) and funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of Estonia. TELplus is an additional block towards the creation of Europeana, the European digital library, museum and archive, and is aimed to strengthen, extend and improve The European Library service.

The BRICKS Project has created a basis for a new generation of digital libraries by establishing the organisational and technological foundations of the European Digital Memory (EDM). The EDM has been reinforced through user support from the 'BRICK'S Community' and conceived as an open, networked system to integrate distributed collections of multimedia resources in museums, libraries and archives. Contract no. : 507457 Activity code: IST-2002-2.3.1.12 Action line: Technology. Enhanced Learning and Access to Cultural heritage

TNT – The Neanderthal Tools was a combined research and technical development project between March 2004 and Febraury 2006 which has been successfully developed advanced services and applications to improve the access to Europe’s cultural heritage, namely to collections and artefacts of the Neanderthals: NESPOS – the Neanderthal Studies Professional Online Service NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ArchChannel. IST-2002-2.3.1.12 Technology-enhanced learning and access to cultural heritage