Bringing Museums.

DIGITAL preservation; DIGITIZATION of archival materials; PROTECTION of cultural property; INFORMATION resources management; ONLINE databases; COMPUTER networks; MULTIMEDIA communications

In most European countries an important effort has been made to preserve, describe, and index the cultural heritage. Recently, many public authorities or private entities have undertaken efforts to digitalize important parts of this heritage. Digitalization means creating databases containing images, reference documents, factual data, and sounds describing as precisely as possible items constituting the cultural heritage. The role of cultural institutions is not only to collect, preserve and display these collections but also to organize the information thus collected. The exchange of information on the world's cultural heritage will help people from different cultures around the world to understand each other better. In the U.S., some major industrial companies have understood that cultural heritage can be used to attract customers to commercial networks. Europe has to be proactive to ensure its fair share of this new market. Fairly large information bases containing millions of multimedia documents have to be created. It is important to design information systems that will effectively manage these information banks, and allow easy retrieval the relevant information.