COINE: Cultural Objects in Networked Environments

The main COINE home page can be found at: http://www.uoc.edu/in3/coine/

Libraries, museums, archives and other local institutions can find new ways to engage with their users through the COINE Project. It harnesses information technology to help people use information, photographs, audio recordings and other objects of interest to them in new ways.

The idea behind the COINE Research and Development Project was to enable people to tell their own stories. New levels of interactivity were proved possible for museums, libraries and other cultural bodies - visitors to participating sites were able not just to use 'exhibits' created for them, but to create their own. Children were able to use pictures, texts and artefacts to record and share their stories or, for example, family histories. Older people used oral history, photographs, video and images of written documents to tell the story of their lives. Each story could then be shared across the internet. An example of a COINE story scenario can be found here.

Running from March 2002 - August 2004 COINE designed the tools needed to create structured, World Wide Web-based environments which allow content to be shared locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. The Project's findings can assist the development of standards for structured deployment and retrieval of digital resources in distributed networked environments. Demonstrations have tested the application in different cultural settings across Europe, including among schoolchildren and citizens' groups.

The COINE Project was part-funded by the European Commission Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme and operated by these partner institutions from across Europe:
• CERLIM at the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK [Co-ordinating partner]
• The Armitt Museum and Library, Ambleside, UK
• Fretwell-Downing Informatics Ltd, Sheffield, UK
• The National Microelectronics Applications Centre Ltd, Limerick, Ireland
• eircom Ennis Information Age Town, Ireland
• Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain
• University of Macedonia Economic and Social Sciences, Thessaloniki, Greece
• The Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland

Further information on COINE can be obtained from Geoff Butters, Project Co-ordinator at CERLIM (Geoffrey Manton Building, the Manchester Metropolitan University, Rosamond Street West, Manchester M15 6LL; tel: 0161-247-6142; fax: 0161-247- 6979; email: g.butters@mmu.ac.uk)