CALIMERA: Cultural Applications: Local Institutions Mediating Electronic Resource Access
Citizens of EU and neighbouring countries to benefit from CALIMERA’s promotion of research on local digital cultural services
Despite the numerous gains made in Internet access in recent years, many people find newly developed technical solutions complicated to use and content difficult to locate. They need better access through locally-available technologies, fewer language barriers and easy-to-use features and interfaces on a convenient range of delivery devices.
CALIMERA was a coordination action to help to ensure that local cultural institutions – public libraries, museums and archives - and their users – ordinary citizens, are able to benefit from and contribute to the goals of the European Commission’s Information Society Technologies (IST) research programme 2002-2006, (http://www.cordis.lu/ist/directorate_e/digicult/events.htm) by emphasising the needs of people for services which are engaging, interactive and easy-to-use.
The CALIMERA partner network involved directly 52 organisations from 42 European and neighbouring countries, including local and municipal public libraries, museums and archives, national authorities, research institutions and solutions providers. But its benefits are available to all. Full details of the action are available at http://www.calimera.org.
The project, which ran from December 2003 to May 2004, built upon the achievements of the PULMAN Network of Excellence, which set the scene for best practice among local institutions throughout Europe http://www.pulmanweb.org.
The work of Calimera focused on four main themes:
- Technologies and research for local services
- Local Services: sharing policies and best practice
- The end user experience
- Dissemination, networking and training
Major project outputs were:
- Research roadmap
- Business Models for local cultural institutions
- Guidelines for professionals and practitioners
- Benchmarking reports on progress in 40 countries
- Community mapping model
- A Solutions Noticeboard
- A usability framework
- Recommendations on an in-service training model for professionals
Further information is available from:
Geoff Butters, CERLIM, <g.butters@mmu.ac.uk>
Or visit CALIMERAweb at http://www.calimera.org