New Economy and Digital Culture - The REGNET Project

The concept of a European Digital Library cannot only be based on a technical framework enabling access to digital goods-there is also a need to introduce new ways of cooperation between different stakeholders (Cultural Organisations, Industries, Administrations, etc.) as well as to "re-engineer" traditional business processes in the light of globalisation and world wide markets. The main activities within a support environment for REGional NETworks project-targets to all of the three areas. The project was introduced under the Action Line 'Access to digital collections of cultural and scientific content' of the European Union IST-Information Society Technologies Programme and 23 partners, cultural organisations (museums, libraries and archives) and IT-industry representatives, from 10 Euro~ean Union states as well as Bulgaria and Russia are participating. ENVISAGED ACHIEVEMENTS REGNET will set up a hnctional network of cultural service centres through Europe which will provide IT-services dedicated to cultural heritage organisations. A technical and legal framework, the REGNET system, for such a service infrastructure will be developed. This will offer services like data entry, search and retrieval, and e-Business. It will be based mainly on integration work using state-of-the-art components. The network will integrate multi-media industries, content providers and service centre operators. Existing cultural infrastructures will be exploited and new infrastructures should be developed where necessary. The technical infrastructure should allow to set up even low cost service centres. The membership concept of the service centres will generate a critical mass of digital or physical goods contained in Content Provider's organisations. THE PLAYERS WITHIN THE NETWORK The four players within the network are the content providers, the service centre operators, the system developers and end users. The content providers (museums, libraries, archives etc.) will provide access (via wired and wireless communication) to their digital contents, services and products and offer them to their clients (B2C). In return they can use the REGNET facilities for multimedia productions and data base management, or cooperate with other REGNET partners during the creation of data bases, generation of multimedia products or creation of a virtual exhibition (B2B). The service centre operators will generate income by providing the technical infrastructure (softwarelhardware'l to content providers and othe; partners within the REGNET network. They offer additional IT-services and consultancies. And the system developers are selling the REGNET system to other cultural service centres and content providers. They implement additional components for the REGNET software system (additional 'nodes' like an 'exhibition creator', etc), …