Robert Hecht
(Österreich)
In recent years, a surprising multitude of new technologies has been employed in archaeological projects. However, in most cases, the publication of results does not keep up with the technology used to achieve them: they are available only in printed form, via the internet or on storage media like DVDs. The potential that lies in combining results from different sources or even finding results in your area of interest is thus lost.
To make the most of digital data, one needs to use a Digital Library which is
- flexible enough to handle arbitrary content,
- allows to annotate it with metadata in a wide variety of standards or proprietary formats,
- provides an intuitive and uniform search interface and
- enables collaboration between users.
The aim of the EU FP6 Project BRICKS is to build such a Digital Library tailored to Cultural Heritage. BRICKS is a decentralized network, which allows all member institutions to run their own network node and to retain full control over the published data, while making them accessible to the whole network. The software runs on normal PCs and is distributed open source and free of charge. It offers all functionalities needed in a Digital Library and a user-friendly web-based graphical interface which makes the functionality of the network accessible from any computer with an internet connection.
We will show the running system to demonstrate how easy it is to upload content and metadata, to find material relevant to your research, and to annotate existing documents – a feature of great value in collaborative projects.
Key words: Digital Libraries, search, publication, collaboration